Azim Premji commits Rs 1,000-cr more for covid fight, says promoting students to next class 'worst thing'

News Network
July 6, 2021

IT major Wipro's philanthropic arm has committed an additional Rs 1,000 crore of grants over and above the Rs 1,125-crore support it had announced in the early days of the pandemic last year, its Founder Chairman Azim Premji said on Tuesday.

The additional grant will be directed primarily on universal vaccination, Premji said while speaking at the foundation day event of the Bombay Chartered Accountants' Society.

In the early days of the pandemic last year, Wipro had announced a Rs 1,125-crore aid for the pandemic, which also included converting its facilities at Pune into hospitals.

"As our work as well as our situation evolved, we realised that focus on universal vaccination was just as important as other initiatives. So, we have added that as a key element of our Covid-19 relief strategy, and committed an additional Rs 1,000 crore for it," Premji said.

Terming the pandemic as a once-a-century event that led to a resolve to fight it with all the resources at disposal, Premji said a comprehensive set of plans was drawn up in the early days itself to tackle both the humanitarian and health aspects.

Grassroot teams were organised consisting of 1,600 full-time employees of the Azim Premji Foundation, 55,000 employees working for its partners, 10,000 teachers and 2,500 alumni of the Azim Premji University.

Premji, who has committed almost his entire wealth of over $80 billion to philanthropic initiatives with a special focus on education, appeared to be strongly against the idea of promoting school students to the next class and stressed that adequate attention needs to be paid to the lost schooling days.

"The worst thing that we could do is to ignore the past one and a half years and just keep promoting children to the next class without helping them to learn what they should have learnt. We can create an enormous deficit which can never be filled up otherwise," he said.

Even as the education system grapples with how to go forward, Premji suggested a graded approach that involves having classes in open areas in neighbourhoods, vaccinating teachers and re-engineering education programmes to ensure that the schooling time lost over the past one and half years is made up.

Premji said the foundation's efforts have helped 83 lakh people in rural communities and the most vulnerable pockets regain their livelihoods through field interventions like seed and fertiliser supply for farmers, and working capital for poultry farmers and handicraft industry.

He said collaborating with the government is important for extending aid deep into the country and added that if one has the required skillsets, the state will "meaningfully" collaborate.

The industry doyen, who now devotes full time to his social sector activities, said his mother who ran a hospital for children and Mahatma Gandhi, who advocated a trusteeship model for wealth, have been his greatest inspirations to take the plunge into philanthropy.

Premji exhorted everyone to start giving earlier in their lives, terming the late start to philanthropic activities in his life as a "regret".

"It is only when we come together in this way we realise the dream of a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society as envisioned in the Indian Constitution," he said.

He asked everybody to go into the real world, get their hands dirty and witness the inequities, injustice and lack of basic dignity in the society first hand to get moved by the contrasts and do some good for the society.

"It is not possible to be emotionally detached. Being empathetic and emotional makes much good happen in this world. Please be moved by it," Premji said.

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News Network
April 4,2025

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Israel has announced the launch of a new ground onslaught in Gaza City, with rescuers saying military aggression has killed at least 30 people across the Palestinian territory since dawn.

In Gaza City, the Israeli military said ground troops had begun pushing into the Shejaiya neighborhood to expand the so-called "security zone" there, claiming that civilians had been allowed to evacuate the area. 

Initial reports, however, said a Palestinian woman and her daughter were just killed in an Israeli artillery shelling on displaced people in Shejaiya.

Gaza's civil defense agency said Israeli military aggression had killed at least 30 people in the Palestinian territory since dawn, adding that the toll was "not final".

A single Israeli strike on Khan Yunis killed at least 25 people, a medical source at the southern city's Nasser Hospital said. 

"The situation is very dangerous, and there is death coming at us from every direction," Elena Halas told AFP reportedly via text message, adding that she and her family were trapped in her sister's house in Shejaiya.

Israel has pushed since the collapse of a short-lived truce in the war to seize territory in Gaza. Simultaneously, it has escalated attacks on Lebanon and Syria, with a strike in the south Lebanese city of Sidon killing a Hamas commander along with his son on Friday. 

Minister of military affairs Israel Katz had said on Wednesday that Israel would bolster its military presence inside the Gaza Strip to "seize large areas that will be incorporated into Israeli security zones", without specifying how much territory.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was dividing Gaza and "seizing territory" to force Hamas to free the remaining captives seized in the October 2023 operation inside southern settlements. 

Netanyahu has said his regime is working closely with the US to implement President Donald Trump's plan to displace Gazans.

Latest air raids have targeted Gaza City, as well as Beit Lahia, Rafah, and Khan Yunis, killing dozens of people and injuring several others.

On Thursday, hundreds of thousands of fleeing Gazans sought shelter in one of the biggest mass displacements of the war, as Israeli forces advanced into the ruins of the city of Rafah. 

A day after declaring their intention to capture large swathes of the crowded territory, Israeli forces pushed into the city on Gaza's southern edge which had served as a last refuge for people fleeing other areas for much of the war.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Thursday that 112 Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes, with at least 70 of those deaths taking place in Gaza City, in the north of the strip. 

Gaza's civil defense agency said women and children were among the dead, while six people were still unaccounted for in the strike on Dar al-Arqam School in the al-Tuffah neighborhood, northeast of Gaza City, including a pregnant woman who was expecting twins. 

Beit Hanoun Mayor Mohammad Nazek Al-Kafarna was one of the victims of the Israeli strike that hit the school on Thursday.

The Health Ministry said on Thursday that 1,163 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since Israel resumed intense bombing on March 18, bringing the overall death toll since the war began to 50,523.

The usurping entity accepted longstanding negotiation terms by the Hamas resistance group under a Gaza ceasefire, which began on January 19.

On March 18, however, Israel unilaterally broke the truce and resumed its relentless bombing of Gaza.

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News Network
April 7,2025

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Rafah, a city along the border of the Gaza Strip and Egypt, has entirely been “wiped off the map” by Israel’s brutal campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, says the Gaza government media office.

The media office said Sunday in a statement on X that the southern city of Gaza has entirely been demolished to make way for Israel to turn it into a “closed military operations zone."

The statement said Israel’s military forces have been carrying out “horrific massacres against defenseless civilians” in Rafah, creating a “full-fledged humanitarian disaster.”

According to the officials, Israeli forces have destroyed over 90% of homes—more than 20,000 buildings in Rafah.

All of the historical buildings, archaeological sites, museums, modern homes, the civilian infrastructure, the shops, cafes, restaurants, hospitals, schools, and universities have been demolished.

The officials said the regime's forces have also demolished 22 of 24 water wells, including a large water treatment plant and facility that was built 25 years ago by the Canadian government.

“Tens of thousands of families” are now without safe drinking water, and over 85% of the sewage system has been destroyed, raising fears of disease outbreaks, said the statement.

At least 12 medical centers are out of service, including Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, which was reportedly blown up by an explosive robot.

Rafah is “uninhabitable,” now, the media office said.

The Israeli military’s goal, it said, is to “empty the land of its people and alter its geographic and demographic features.”

Rafah, a city that was built over 3,300 years ago, had a population of 171,889. As recently as February, 1.4 million Palestinians took shelter there as a result of Israel’s forced displacement of the population in northern parts of the besieged enclave.

The city, which was once designated as a "safe zone" by Israel's military, has now been reduced to rubble. The regime's military has now seized the ruins of Rafah and ordered every survivor out, to expand its "security buffer zone" along Gaza's borders.

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News Network
March 27,2025

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The Karnataka government has announced that Nandini milk will become ₹4 costlier per litre starting April 1, 2025. This is the second price hike this year.

The decision was made during a cabinet meeting led by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. Karnataka Cooperation Minister K N Rajanna and Animal Husbandry Minister K Venkatesh said the increase is meant to support dairy farmers by covering the rising costs of producing and processing milk.

Officials also said that:

>> The extra money from the price hike will go directly to the milk producers.

>> The earlier ₹2 price hike (announced on June 26, 2024) will be withdrawn.

>> The new price hike of ₹4 will apply to both 500 ml and 1-litre packets.

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