Orissa Victims in Net loss The Hindustan Times, 24th Nov'99 If there is hell on earth, it’s here, the website screams, vehemently summing up the post- supercyclone scenario in Orissa. The site, www.causeanaffect.org is one of the handful that have come up swiftly to the rescue of over 15 million cyclone-ravaged people. All that a visitor to the website has to do is click on a button on the home page, and sponsors provide free donations of food to the victims. The whole idea arose out of a will to help the common man using technology,says Sriram Bharatam, Director-Co-Founder, Iridium Interactive, the firm that hosts the site. We always found the surfers spending a lot of time clicking aimlessly around the Web. So we thought of actually accomplishing something with their click and hence emerged the message: Your click is precious! Save it for a life, he adds. In about ten days, over 17,00,000 donations were made on the site, accounting for distribution of about 2,88,000 packets of food, claims the site.Impressive figures, those! But unfortunately, the vast potential of the Internet to carry out relief operations is still to be tapped. More distressing is the fact that most of the sites on the Internet, which have put up requests for online contributions for the cyclone victims, belong to international charitable organisations. Where is India? The London-based Disasters Emergency Committee claims to have raised £3,329,166 as on November 19 through its India Cyclone Appeal on the site http://www.Candric.com/appeal. An earnest plea for donation to the cyclone victims is made on the site http://www.weborissa.com/cyclone that belongs to a US-based non-profit organisation, India Development and Relief Fund. Be it the American Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services United Methodist Committee on Relief UMCOR at or Lutheran World Relief , most relief appeals come from foreign quarters. The Indian media has also not exploited its online presence to collect relief funds.The Hindustan Times, which has put up donation appeals for the Hindustan Benevolent Trust on its sites www.hindustantimes.com and www.digitalht.com, is one of the few media websites that have risen to the occasion. The Government of India too has thankfully thought of levering its online presence.It has a detailed update on the calamity on its website http://www.nic.in/cycloneorissa. Despite the fact that the cyclone has taken more lives and is a greater loss to the national exchequer than Kargil, Orissa has not attracted the same attention on the Net. If you want to contribute try www.aidindia.org/orissa. << Back   ITC | Quality | Services | USP | In News Copyright © 1999 Iridium Technologies (India) Pvt.Ltd. All rights reserved. iridium@iridiumtech.com