MUMBAI: In the times of grave crisis where countries and giant corporates are donating their salaries and huge amounts, people from the standup comedy industry came forward to support the country. To fight the crisis, 80 + Indian comedians and influencers came together to do a fundraiser from 2- 10 PM on 11 & 12 April in partnership with COVIDIndia.org and Kashtakari panchayat. As funds raised will be utilised by COVIDIndia.org to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to frontline health workers of Sion Hospital, Mumbai & JP Hospital, Bhopal. Both hospitals are two of India's nodal centres for treatment, isolation and quarantine for COVID-19 patients in their respective cities. 

The charity stream was hosted through Tanmay Bhat’s YouTube channel where Tanmay and Kaneez Surka were the hosts for the stream along with Kenny Sebastian, Abish Mathew along with 80+ other comics entertaining masses all across the world to gather donations for helping India fight COVID-19. The stream was filled with different exciting activities such as playing the popular first-person shooter game ‘PUBG’ along with short KVIZ zones and scribble drawing games. Fundraiser followed a three-pronged strategy where funds gathered through COVIDIndia’s campaign on India’s leading giving platform GiveIndia, UPI based payments on 8291378363 along with direct payments through super chat feature of YouTube where money was sent through YouTube’s portal.  

Live Link to this live stream will be available on Tanmay’s YouTube channel for two more days. 

Riddhi Mittal, co-founder for the initiative said, ‘CovidIndia is proud to partner with Indian comedy community for an event, Stay Home for India, which brings together 80+ comedians, youtubers, influencers and gamers for a live stream over the weekend of 11th and 12th April. We are grateful to everyone who has been gracious enough to contribute their time to this phenomenal initiative.’ 

COVIDIndia.org’s GiveIndia fundraiser aims to raise INR 35 lakh by the end of April 2020 towards procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) kits for a needy frontline health workers.   

Fundraiser still continues on GiveIndia on this campaign link:  https://fundraisers.giveindia.org/campaigns/support-healthcare-wokers-with-ppes-and-n95-mask

 COVIDIndia.org is a group of 1000+ passionate professionals dedicated towards providing critical data, technological and supply services to combat the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Started in March 2020 by Riddhi Mittal, a Stanford alumni and Girish Khera, MD of Scientific Animations, the group strives to leverage resources and networks to help state and district war rooms, hospitals and frontline workers in responding to the pandemic effectively and safely on a time-bound basis. Link to website - https://covidindia.org/

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