The surrounding areas of Kolkata, especially near the Sunderbans and adjoining Bangladesh, are seeing the worst effects of climate change. 100-year storms that affect millions of lives with wind gusts of over 150 kmph have started appearing with alarming regularity. In November 2019, we had Cyclone Bulbul, followed by Cyclones Fani and Amphan in the summer of 2020. While loss of life has been thankfully low, livelihoods of millions has been uprooted — their farmlands destroyed by saline water, and their livestock dead.
Simultaneously, the COVID crisis during the spring of 2020 and the delta variant in 2021, along with the national shutdowns, caused acute food shortages among daily wage earners.
With tens of thousands affected during the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan and Bulbul, Kolkata Foundation worked with local nonprofits Rural Healthcare Foundation and Mukti, to conduct over 250 mobile health camps across dozens of locations and treated 25000+ patients.
Waterborne diseases, such as dysentery, diarrhea, malaria, and cholera tend to spike during such calamities - a situation made worse in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID outbreaks caused by migrant laborers returning home carrying the virus.
The health camps conducted by Mukti and RHCF provided a doctor's consultation along with free medicines.
Originally from Kolkata, Sanjukta & Arindam are currently executives working in Silicon Valley and busy parents of two sons. Both came to the US for graduate studies in Computer Science. Arindam is also an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission, two of the finest educational institutions in West Bengal.
A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Kolkata, Shubhomoy has worked at several Wall Street firms as a research analyst and currently holds a senior position at Blackrock. Shubhomoy and Sanjeeta have been associated with Kolkata Foundation since 2017.
Sanat and Indrani live in Newtown, PA. Indrani likes to keep busy with family and various philanthropic activities, especially focusing on women’s empowerment while Sanat maintains a hectic schedule as Executive VP and President, Merck Manufacturing. Sanat sits on the Board of US-India Strategic Partnership Forum and Hilleman Laboratories through which he actively helps many different causes to promote welfare in India as well as globally.
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Kolkata Foundation is a global non-profit working to improve the lives of the neediest in Kolkata through high impact social interventions in education, women’s empowerment, and healthcare. It is a call to action: to unite, give, change lives, and kindle hope.
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