Mumbai: While people of his age are keen on building their career, 29-year-old Chinu Kwatra has something different in store. This youth has taken an initiative of reaching out to the underprivileged children.
After spending his quality time with these kids in the past, Chinu Kwatra started Roti Ghar in December 2017, an initiative of Khusiyan Foundation. Under this initiative, daily more than 600 underprivileged children are provided food and basic level of education by the volunteers of the foundation.
In the beginning, the foundation started to serve food to 70-75 children and a few number of children turned out there seeking free education. Currently, Roti Ghar is set up by the Khusiyan Foundation at five places in the city namely Mahim, Kandivali, Borivali, Bhandup and Bhiwandi.
According to Chinu, initially when he had taken the initiative of starting this foundation, but faced lot of problems in gathering funds, later when he started sharing it on social media, people soon began to show interest in his social cause by sponsoring food for these children.
Chinu said around 300 volunteers are involved with Roti Ghar. Certain people on their birthday or wedding anniversary sponsor the children one-day meal by paying the foundation Rs 3,500 for 100 kids.
“When I started this intiative children here were malnourished due to improper quantity and quality of food. I have a few friends who are doctors and dieticians, and on their advise I intially started to serve them only dal and rice. Later, after some days, we started changing their diet and now they are doing quite well health-wise,” says Chinu gushingly.
According to Chinu, these children stay at Thane’s dumping ground, whose parents are rag pickers. They make a living of Rs 100-200 per day by selling rags. Their children being uneducated, it took the foundation some time to get the kids into studying habit.
“We took the initiatve of making them understand the importance of education in life. There are also a few groups like XLNC Dil Se, Ammucare and Ananta who help us financially to run the foundation smoothly. These kids go to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) schools where they get mid-day meal and when they return in the evening at 5, we serve dinner to them,” says Chinu.
“It feels sad that how people live here in such bad condition, but even we have our limitations. We are trying our best to to help, try and do what even best we can do for them. I am even thinking of planning small business of plastic waste management in order to generate jobs for the parents of these children,” concludes an emotional Chinu.
