Covid-19 may or not, but hunger definitely threatens these attendants

It is already 1 pm, they should have been here, the unshaven elderly man adds impatiently looking down at his friends sitting on the stone bench and clutching yellow-coloured plastic empty plates.

The men seated on the bench do not respond and stare at the vacuum wondering where their next meal would come from. A little further away, a woman in her early sixties prepares to return with the empty steel box to the women’s ward in District Wenlock Hospital on realising that the ‘Snehalaya Maanna’ vehicle will not be coming and distributing free rice and sambhar.

‘’Free rice, sambhar and rotis for dinner had prevented us from begging on the streets,’’ reveals a woman from Kalaburagi as she retraces her steps to the ward, where her sister-in-law is recovering from a kidney ailment.

Snehalaya Charitable Trust’s Snehalaya Maanna, which provides free mid-day meals to the poor attendants, was disrupted on Tuesday, for the first time since its launch in August 14, 2015.

Even Mercy Friends, a group of like-minded people, had stopped ‘Karunya’, an initiative offering free dinner to the caretakers of the poor patients admitted to the government-run Wenlock Hospital.

The temporary disruption in serving free-mid day meals and dinner to the poor attendants is due to the Covid-19 crisis, sources in District Wenlock Hospital said.

Snehalaya Charitable Trust Managing Trustee Joseph Crasta expressing helplessness said they had to stop the free mid-day meals to over 700 attendants due to an increase in the number of patients testing positive to Covid-19 in the Wenlock hospital. “Besides, attendants do not maintain the necessary social-distance while queuing up to receive food served by my staff,’’ Crasta explained.

He said, ‘’I am taking all precautions possible to ensure that none of the 300 mentally ill inmates in Snehalaya test positive to Covid-19.’’

As the attendants stare at a virtual starvation, Crasta is hopeful of resuming mid-day meals at the earliest.

‘’The attendants at District Wenlock hospital are the poorest among the poor and I want to do more for them,’’ he said.