In a blog post, actor Amitabh Bachchan answered the barrage of critical remarks that celebrities have received in response to their humanitarian activities during India’s second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. He announced that he has donated Rs. 2 crores to a Delhi-based Covid-19 center.
He wrote that speaking openly about his charity work is ’embarrassing,’ and that ‘everyday bullying and the filth of distasteful remarks’ has been a problem for him and his family since ‘time immemorial.’
Amitabh then went on to list his charitable endeavors. “My personal fund has paid off over 1500 farmer bank loans, preventing them from committing suicide,” he said. Many that were unable to attend the formalities were transferred by rail, ‘at his own cost.’
Last year, he wrote, he supported ‘food for over 400,000 daily wage earners in the country for a month… feeding nearly 5000 in the city per day lunch and dinner… from personal funds,’ as well as masks, PPE units to front line soldiers, Police Hospitals in the thousands…’
For stranded migrant workers, he wrote that he “booked 30 buses to locations in UP and Bihar and supplied them food and water for the overnight travel,” and that he “supplied food and water for the overnight travel” and that he “booked an entire train from Mumbai to UP to carry 2800 migrant passengers free of cost at my expense… and when the destination State blocked the train from entering their State and canceled the train… immediately chartered three Indigo Airlines planes and flew nearly 180 migrants to UP and Bihar, as well as some to Rajasthan and J&K…” he said.
Amitabh also mentioned that he arranged for 20 ventilators for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and donated to a facility established at the Rakabganj Sahib Gurudwara. He wrote that he had ‘donated an entire Diagnostic Centre… opened at Bangla Sahib Gurudwara in Delhi through the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee,’ and that he had ‘adopted’ two children who had lost their parents to Covid-19 and would be funding their education until the 10th grade.
He continued by writing that this was not “aggrandizement,” but rather something to be emulated.
