Khas Khabar 

When India went into its first nationwide lockdown, millions of families experienced an abrupt collapse of income. Streets emptied, markets closed, and the workers who kept cities running like the domestic workers, rickshaw pullers, labourers, vendors suddenly had no way to earn the next day’s meal. In these early weeks, hunger spread faster than the virus itself. It was in this unsettling quiet that Project Umeed came into being.

The Khas Khabar feature traces Umeed’s beginnings to a small group of citizens who refused to stand by as their communities struggled. The team began with a simple intention: to deliver ration kits to ten families who had lost all means of livelihood.

What happened next became one of the most striking examples of community-led relief during the lockdown. Word spread from lane to lane, and distress messages poured in from neighbourhoods where food insecurity had become immediate and acute. Volunteers stepped forward. Teachers, college students, auto drivers, shopkeepers, and residents, each offering time, transport, or supplies. What began as ten families grew into 50,000-plus households across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and several other states.

Khas Khabar highlighted the hyper-local model that made this expansion possible. Volunteers mapped pockets of need, identified families with no access to ration cards, and worked alongside community leaders to make sure food reached where it was needed most. Each kit contained staples such as rice, dal, flour, oil, and basic hygiene supplies, carefully assembled to last an entire family several days.

The feature also emphasised the emotional resilience this work generated, not only among those receiving support, but among the volunteers themselves. Many described the act of delivering food as a grounding reminder of shared humanity at a time when isolation had become the norm.

Khas Khabar captured the spirit of Umeed’s founding phase perfectly, as a movement defined not by its size, but by the solidarity that shaped it.