On November 12, 2023, part of the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand collapsed. Forty-one workers were trapped behind the rubble. An American auger machine drilled toward them, then ran into obstacles and stopped.
A company involved in the rescue approached Wakeel Hassan, who leads a team of rat-hole miners. Twelve men who specialized in rat-hole mining were flown in from Delhi. They cleared the last stretch by hand. All 41 workers were rescued on November 28.
In April 2021, during the second wave of Covid-19, Indians appealed on social media for hospital beds, oxygen and medicines. Many tagged B.V. Srinivas, president of the Indian Youth Congress, in their appeals. “We have received more than 40000 requests and enquiries about hospital beds, oxygen, Remdesivir and plasma,” he told Outlook on April 16.
According to The Week, his network of 1,000 volunteers worked with Covid centers across the states.
In August 2018, floods covered large parts of Kerala. The state’s Fisheries Minister, J. Mercykutty Amma, said that fishermen in 669 mechanized country boats had rescued 65,000 people.
“We shared location information on WhatsApp,” one of them, Rony Thomas, told ThePrint.
Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. More than 170,000 Indians were stranded there. Buses took them through Basra and Baghdad to Amman in Jordan. From there, Air India and Indian Airlines flew them to Bombay on 488 flights. Air India entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people evacuated by a civil airliner.
Indians based in Kuwait helped organize it. Among them was Mathunny Mathews, called Toyota Sunny. The 2016 film Airlift, starring Akshay Kumar, drew on their work.
In December 2015, floods hit Chennai. Twitter helped with the rescue and relief work. The actor Siddharth and the radio host RJ Balaji collected food and volunteers. “We have around 2,000 odd food packets as of now and we are segregating them as we get them,” Siddharth said.
A team of economists followed 822 people in Delhi who set out to get a driver’s license. “More than 70% of the participants in our study who obtained a license hired an agent.” Seventy percent of the participants reported getting a permanent license without taking the mandatory practical test at the Regional Transport Office.
The study, by Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainathan, was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
In Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), directed by Dibakar Banerjee, Kamal Khosla spends his savings on a plot of land in South Delhi. A builder, Khurana, has it taken over by squatters. The family appeals to the police, lawyers, ministers and social workers, and gets nowhere.
Friends then plan a con. A theater group plays an industrialist from Dubai with land to sell. Khurana pays an advance in cash, and the Khoslas use his money to pay him off.
In 2020, Transparency International published its Global Corruption Barometer for Asia. India had the highest rate of citizens using personal connections to get public services, 46 percent. It also had the highest bribery rate, 39 percent.
In March 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aslam Chaudhury ran a kitchen for hungry workers from the mosque in Kalu Sarai, Delhi. It made 600 to 700 food packets a day. He needed cooking vessels. “The langar is shut, so I asked them if I could borrow their vessels,” he told The Caravan. The Gurdwara Shri Singh Sabha in the same village lent the vessels and sent two cooks.