Her exam revision done, schoolgirl Swadha Prasad gets on with her real work: finding life-saving oxygen, drugs and hospital beds for people with COVID-19 as India faces a second wave of infections.
As the Indian government struggles to tackle the pandemic, young people have stepped into the breach, setting up apps to crowdsource aid, delivering key supplies and using social media to direct resources to people in need.
Prasad works with dozens of volunteers — all aged 14 to 19 — as part of a youth-led organization called UNCUT, building online databases packed with information about medical resources available across the country.
The operation runs non-stop, with the teenagers constantly on their phones as they verify the availability of supplies, update information in real time and field calls from frantic relatives.
“Some of us do midnight to morning shifts, because the calls don’t stop at 3am,” said Prasad, 17, who works a 14-hour stretch from before midday until 1am.
It is a long and often tiring affair, the Mumbai-based student said.
“If I can help save a life, there is no part of me that is going to say no,” she said.
And lives have been saved, she said, pointing to a case where the team sourced oxygen for a young patient in the middle of the night after an agonizing two-hour wait.
“It’s not only about providing resources ... sometimes people just need to know they are not alone,” she said.
With two-thirds of its 1.3 billion people under the age of 35, India is an overwhelmingly young country, but its young people have never been called on to shoulder such huge responsibilities.
In the slums of Mumbai, Shanawaz Shaikh has provided free oxygen to thousands of people.
Known popularly as the “oxygen man,” the 32-year-old sold his cherished SUV in June last year to fund the initiative after his friend’s pregnant cousin died in a rickshaw while trying to get admitted to a hospital.
“She died because she couldn’t get oxygen in time,” he told reporters.
He never expected to be fielding so many requests nearly a year later.
“We used to get around 40 calls a day last year, now it’s more like 500,” he said.
Shaikh’s team of 20 volunteers are also battling a massive shortage, made worse by profiteers.
“It’s a test of one’s faith, but when I am able to help someone, I feel like crying,” he said, describing how he sometimes travels dozens of kilometers to source oxygen for desperate patients.
While major cities have borne the brunt so far, the limitations of technology are becoming apparent as the virus burrows into smaller towns and villages, software engineer Umang Galaiya told reporters.
Urgent requests for supplies and spare hospital beds have promoted a flood of leads on Twitter — many unconfirmed.
Galaiya responded by building an app to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for and, crucially, limit their search to verified resources only.
Even so, his app is unlikely to help people outside big cities, the 25-year-old said, citing the example of his hometown in hard-hit Gujarat state where Internet usage is low.
“If I look for resources in Jamnagar, there is nothing on Twitter,” he said.
Ultimately the pandemic cannot be defeated without the government, he said, outlining simple measures that could have saved many lives.
For instance, officials could have created a real-time, automatically updated online registry of beds, to spare distressed patients the effort of running from one packed facility to another.
“If we can do it for movie theaters, to avoid overbooking, why can’t we do it for hospitals?” he asked.
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