Most people are not aware of the fact that India is home to the largest population of the hungry in the world. Recent studies have shown that approximately 20,00,00,000 people go hungry each day in our country, of which 7,000 people, including 3,000 children, die every day from starvation or some poor-diet related illness. To put that in perspective, by the time you finished reading the previous two statements, 2 needless deaths have occurred somewhere in our great nation, and by the time you finish reading this paragraph, at least 1 child has lost her life to the most preventable ailment in human history: hunger.
As a society, we have become so used to seeing the less fortunate sitting by the side of roads, huddled together for warmth or perhaps each other’s company, that they have essentially become invisible to us. At this point, one may ask “But what can we do? Those numbers seem so daunting. How could we ever make a difference?”. And it is at this point that one needs to keep in mind that even if one person gets to sleep at night with their stomach full instead of empty, to them even the smallest of efforts have made all the difference in the world.
It was with this mindset that Mohd. Sujathullah – a Pharm.D student barely 23 at the time – went out to the railway station one hot afternoon back in 2016, and served rice and curry to at least ten poor people. What had started out as a good deed soon tore at his heart when he saw the abject conditions that those people lived in, when he saw the stark reality of hunger in the eyes of the children that gathered around him when they saw he was distributing food. It felt so good to Sujathullah to fill their bellies until they smiled for the first time in days, that he went out and did the same thing the next day. And the next, and the next, using his own pocket money. It instilled in him an internal sense of responsibility to help as many people as he could, and soon he started serving food to more than 100 hungry souls outside a government hospital.
In the 3 years since then Sujathullah has vastly expanded his service, and runs an NGO he founded called Humanity First. He now feeds over 1000 people each day, irrespective of religion, caste, creed, age, gender, or profession, serving breakfast outside of 3 government hospitals every morning. On Sundays he goes a step further and organizes free breakfast distribution at an orphanage, an old age home, and a home for the disabled, in addition to the three hospitals, feeding a total of 1500+ people in a single day.
With such expansion, however, comes a lot of expense. It costs Humanity First Foundation at least ₹1,60,000 every month to feed these many unfortunate souls. Sujathullah relies entirely on donations from people like you to sustain his operation at this scale. And with International Charity Day coming up in a couple of weeks, now is the best time ever to donate to his worthy cause. Every single Rupee counts, because it costs just ₹5 to feed one person for a day. That means if you donate ₹1,000, you’d be preventing needless hunger in 200 people tomorrow, some of them disabled, some of them orphaned, all of them desperate.
As you can see, the numbers really aren’t that daunting, and you can do something. Even if you don’t have the time or ability to go out and feed people yourself, you can donate to Sujathullah’s cause and help him help others. Donate now, and you too can make a difference, one person at a time.
As a society, we have become so used to seeing the less fortunate sitting by the side of roads, huddled together for warmth or perhaps each other’s company, that they have essentially become invisible to us. At this point, one may ask “But what can we do? Those numbers seem so daunting. How could we ever make a difference?”. And it is at this point that one needs to keep in mind that even if one person gets to sleep at night with their stomach full instead of empty, to them even the smallest of efforts have made all the difference in the world.
It was with this mindset that Mohd. Sujathullah – a Pharm.D student barely 23 at the time – went out to the railway station one hot afternoon back in 2016, and served rice and curry to at least ten poor people. What had started out as a good deed soon tore at his heart when he saw the abject conditions that those people lived in, when he saw the stark reality of hunger in the eyes of the children that gathered around him when they saw he was distributing food. It felt so good to Sujathullah to fill their bellies until they smiled for the first time in days, that he went out and did the same thing the next day. And the next, and the next, using his own pocket money. It instilled in him an internal sense of responsibility to help as many people as he could, and soon he started serving food to more than 100 hungry souls outside a government hospital.
“These people seemed to me the most desperate. They come to government hospitals because they can’t even afford medical care for themselves or their loved ones. They come from other districts, or even out of state, and have no one to care about them, to ask them if they had a meal that day. I wanted to be that person for them.” - Sujathullah
In the 3 years since then Sujathullah has vastly expanded his service, and runs an NGO he founded called Humanity First. He now feeds over 1000 people each day, irrespective of religion, caste, creed, age, gender, or profession, serving breakfast outside of 3 government hospitals every morning. On Sundays he goes a step further and organizes free breakfast distribution at an orphanage, an old age home, and a home for the disabled, in addition to the three hospitals, feeding a total of 1500+ people in a single day.
With such expansion, however, comes a lot of expense. It costs Humanity First Foundation at least ₹1,60,000 every month to feed these many unfortunate souls. Sujathullah relies entirely on donations from people like you to sustain his operation at this scale. And with International Charity Day coming up in a couple of weeks, now is the best time ever to donate to his worthy cause. Every single Rupee counts, because it costs just ₹5 to feed one person for a day. That means if you donate ₹1,000, you’d be preventing needless hunger in 200 people tomorrow, some of them disabled, some of them orphaned, all of them desperate.
As you can see, the numbers really aren’t that daunting, and you can do something. Even if you don’t have the time or ability to go out and feed people yourself, you can donate to Sujathullah’s cause and help him help others. Donate now, and you too can make a difference, one person at a time.
