Joining hands for a social cause

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, June 18

Contributing their bit, members of the Youth Morcha, Jalandhar, are distributing langar to the patients at Civil Hospital from the last 50 days. Besides this, a similar service is also being carried out for the migrant workers at the city bus stand from past nearly a month.

Around 20 volunteers along with nine members of the morcha are engaged in this service. All the youth involved in the work are city’s businessmen who came together at the time of Kisan Morcha events held in the past few months.

“Supporting Kisan Mazdoor Ekta, we were holding events at Delhi borders besides organising parallel programmes in Jalandhar which brought us all together. We developed a good system to manage langar and hence we decided to carry it on at the lunch hour for the 120-150 poor patients and their families coming for treatment at the Civil Hospital,” said Gagandeep Dhatt, president of the morcha, adding that two members were engaged in service on a particular day and a roster had been made so that everyone was doing the duty turn-wise-turn.

Other members of the morcha who are engaged in this service are Vikram Dhiman, Manbir Singh, Jaskirat Toor and Prabhjot Khalsa among others. While Dhatt’s family is running Ramgarhia Group of Institutions, Dhiman runs a popular gym in the city, Manbir is the MD of CT Group of Institutions, Toor has a business in electronics and Khalsa runs a tyre store.

Sharing details of his initiative, Dhatt said: “The langar is cooked at a gurdwara on Garha Road under the supervision of our members and gurdwara staff. Everything is cooked fresh daily. The key objective of this is to serve humanity during the time of pandemic where people are losing their loved ones besides facing financial loss of their daily wages. We will continue the same in future too.”

Besides langar, the morcha members are also engaged in other social welfare works. Recently, the members donated Rs 31,000 to a poor migrant worker for the marriage of his daughter. Besides, they also provided him ration for the wedding, trousseau and footwear for the bride, blankets, bed sheets and kitchenware.

The members said they had planned more initiatives too. “We will be donating tricycles to some physically disabled persons. Next, we are also going to start a plantation drive,” they said.