GiveIndia starts COVID response fund with initial donation of Rs 75 cr

Non-profit organisation GiveIndia on Tuesday announced the launch of "India COVID Response Fund" (ICRF) with initial donations of Rs 75 crore that have come in, to support the on-ground COVID-19 relief efforts being carried out by its network of verified non-profit organisations.

A GiveIndia statement said that the fund will use a data-backed approach to identify the most critical areas of intervention and scale the relief efforts pan-India. GiveIndia has appealed to individuals and companies to come forward and support the India Covid Response Fund in order to enable creation of a larger corpus that can support up to 1 crore people across the country.

Govind Iyer, Director, GiveIndia and Advisor, ICRF said: "Since we started fundraising for COVID relief work on March 22, we have received donations from more than 2 lakh people globally, raised Rs 75 crore, partnered with 40+ organisations, onboarded 100+ nonprofits, and these initial efforts will impact 1 million people."

"However, the on-ground requirement is much larger and our fund is an open platform for all of us to come together and support the most critical need of the hour," Iyer said.

Some of the early donors to the fund include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org, HSBC India, Omidyar Network India, UBS Optimus Foundation, Marico, Uber India (through Uber Care driver fund), Binny Bansal and A.T.E. Chandra Foundation.

GiveIndia has also launched a fundraiser on Facebook and invited Indians from all walks of life to come forward and join the initiative.

An Expert Advisory Group has been set up to guide fundraise and allocations, including Dr Devi Shetty, (Chairman, Narayana Health), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Chairman, Biocon), Sanjiv Mehta (Chairman, HUL), Surendra Rosha (CEO, HSBC India), Binny Bansal (co-founder, Flipkart), Manoj Kohli (Country Head, Softbank), and Amitabh Chaudhry (CEO, Axis Bank), among others

ICRF will focus on preventing the spread of the coronavirus, providing humanitarian aid, supporting health workers and enabling the COVID-hit families to rebuild their livelihoods. GiveIndia will be working with and supporting non-profits across health, disaster relief, rural livelihoods, etc including Akshaya Patra, Goonj, HelpAge India, ActionAid, Oxfam, CRY, Srijan and many others through this fund. IANS