Region : South Asia
City : Mumbai
Country : India

For quite some time, our Mumbai Chapter had been intending to fund in our own small way some charitable non-government organization (NGO) that was doing the kind of work that we wished to support and encourage. After considering several such NGOs in our city of Mumbai, each of which was doubtlessly rendering remarkable service to society at large, we finally zeroed in on one called the Nana Palkar Smruti Samiti (NPSS). A couple of us from our Chapter visited the main facility of this NGO in the labour class area of central Mumbai. We were given a rather eye-opening tour of the 10-floor facility with detailed explanations and all our questions satisfactorily answered by NPSS manager Krishna Mahadik.This 10-storied building of the Nana Palkar Smruti Samiti, the NGO established in 1968, provides accommodation to 55 cancer-stricken patients and their care-givers in self-contained rooms. The charges are very nominal and often waived when the patient is really poor and is under treatment free of charge. So is the food from the clean canteen on the premises. The NGO provides ambulance services as well and several floors have various treatment facilities for dialysis, medical guidance, lithotripsy, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis counseling. The most important activity is the accommodation to the cancer patients. There's India's main cancer hospital, Tata Memorial Hospital, in the vicinity, which is so overwhelmed by patients - children and old amongst them, many of whom come from far-off villages- that it is unable to accommodate them all. These poor people are thus compelled to make their home on the streets outside the hospital for the duration of their treatment as they cannot afford hotel rooms, howsoever cheap. In such pathetic environs, their condition actually deteriorates. This is where NPSS volunteers scour the streets and offer accommodation to some of the most miserable of them. Of course, even the 55 rooms (each of which accommodates 2 patients with 2 relatives each) are grossly inadequate. But they are something. So our Chapter raised some money from our own pockets and made a small donation to the NGO. We hope to do this again sometime in future. That apart, our Chapter meets regularly now every quarter, the last meeting having been on 1 December 2011. The next one will be on 1 March 2012. A couple of us met officials of the World Trade Centre Mumbai to discuss how we could collaborate on an event together tentatively scheduled for March. (In May, when EWC celebrates its annual day, most people here are on holiday because of the long summer holidays that we have here). Our Chapter had also sent the required letters of appeal (regarding the US Congress’s threatened withdrawal of support to the EWC in Hawaii) to both the acting US Ambassador in New Delhi and our Ambassador in Washington, but no response or even acknowledgment from either!