Dr. Ruchika Talwar, a resident physician of urology at the University of Philadelphia, has managed to raise $500,000 (Rs 3,66,27,250 currently) to send essential supplies to India to aid the fight against the COVID-19 crisis.
The money is being used to send oxygen concentrators and other supplies along with paying for shipping expenses to India. The oxygen concentrators and other medical supplies will be reaching Lok Nayak Hospital Delhi, Ram Krishna Mission hospitals in Lucknow and Kolkata, Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, and KEM in Mumbai, a CNN report mentioned.
State-run hospitals have been among the worst hit by the oxygen shortage in India due to a rapid surge of COVID-19 infections that the healthcare infrastructure in the country has been unable to cope with. Many COVID-19 patients have died in hospitals due to the short supply of oxygen.
Dr. Talwar’s philanthropic efforts started at a small scale at first, as she along with her mother, who is a graduate of Maulana Azad Medical College in Delhi, wanted to send 50 oxygen concentrators to India. Her mother’s former colleagues in India have been helping her to ensure that deliveries are reaching the right places.
Dr. Talwar has been posting on her Instagram account with the latest updates, maintaining a level of transparency that has perhaps only elevated people’s willingness to contribute to her grassroots-level effort for COVID-19 support.
She posted on her Instagram yesterday, announcing that the oxygen concentrators from the first $10,000 she had collected had finally arrived in Delhi ready to be used in the city’s hospitals.
"My first and foremost concern is for the patients, that's my role as a physician. So we're just a group of a couple of physicians trying to get help where help is needed and people keep giving me feedback that I'm giving them transparency and telling them where these concentrators are going and that they can see where their money is going," Dr. Talwar said to CNN.
