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#GiveupChallenge by young TN bureaucrat wins hearts

Last Updated 05 April 2020, 16:24 IST

Meat and fish are staple diet of an average non-vegetarian household in Tamil Nadu every Sunday. But crowding at these shops where social distancing has gone for a toss in the times of COVID-19 is a major issue that several district administrations in the state have been facing since the 21-day lockdown was announced.

To lessen the crowd at the markets and keep people away from those shops, a young bureaucrat at the helm of affairs in Tiruppur, the knitwear hub that accounts for 46 per cent of India’s garment exports, threw a #GiveUpChallenge on Twitter on Saturday night.

Dr K Vijayakarthikeyan, the district collector who is quite active on Twitter, asked people not to crowd the market and meat stalls in the city and elsewhere in the district. He also asked people giving up their favourite food to help the administration regulate things better to post their stories of “self-control” and “self-sacrifice” and share them with him.

The challenge evoked “good response” from people who posted their stories of giving up non-vegetarian food for a day and turning to simpler delicacies that are made with ingredients available at home.

From ragi dosa to bread toast to boiled egg with bread to sweet potatoes to ragi balls to white rice with sambar made of vegetables from their roof gardens – people posted pictures of “simple food” and tagged the district collector. Though meat shops and fish stalls did function, the crowd was 60 per cent less than what was witnessed last week, officials said.

And Vijayakarthikeyan himself began the chain of reaction by posting a picture of three slices of bread and orange and mentioning that he has “given up a lot of my favourite dishes and been sticking to Toasted Bread slices and any available fruit for breakfast.” “What have you given up?” he asked.

The collector has been leading a lot of new initiatives ever since the outbreak of COVID-19 began by installing the first “disinfection tunnel”, getting several provision shops to home deliver goods to avoid crowding at shops and pre-packed sets of vegetables and fruits delivered at the doorstep.

Gobinath, who tweets through the handle @Gobinat53117992 wrote he gave up non-vegetarian dishes on Sunday. “Preferred dishes prepared from vegetables from our garden itself. It has been a fantastic feeling getting up early and roaming in the garden and searching for vegetables in small plants. Thank you for the initiative,” he wrote posting a picture with a bowl of rice and another bowl full of vegetable sambar.

Another user Wasim Feroze, whose Twitter handle is @Ferozeshaja, wrote: “#GiveUpchallenge I had given up my Sunday favourite non-veg breakfast and having wheat dosa mixed with spinach. Inspired from Vijayakarthikeyan.”

The collector told DH that the motive behind the move was to keep maximum people away from markets that would lead to crowding and tell others that not having their favourite food is also a sacrifice.

“Even if 1 per cent of the people stay at home, it would be a success. I thought the challenge would not just keep people home, but also make them eat whatever they have at home, sacrificing for the larger good of the society. I am happy at the way the challenge has panned out,” he said.

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(Published 05 April 2020, 16:03 IST)

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