Krishna Kumar Gupta has had more than his fair share of COVID19 experiences. Not just because he, his wife and his child all were down with the coronavirus, but because he chose to help out people caught unawares by the pandemic, lockdown and the general panic. 

Gupta is a senior filaria inspector with the Uttar Pradesh government in Barabanki district, about 30 kilometers from the state capital Lucknow. He has put in nearly 24 years of service. 

The 46-year-old said he would never forget May 21, last year when he was at the Barabanki junction railway station tasked with the job of screening people for COVID19. “A woman who was waiting to be screened was in considerable distress. She had a baby in her arms and she was squeezing drops of water into the infant’s mouth from a wet handkerchief,”  KK Gupta, as he is popularly known told told Gaon Connection. The woman was a migrant labourer who was heading home to Faizabad, and she had no money with her to feed her baby milk.

“I arranged for the milk, and asked for a doctor to do a check up of both mother and the baby. I later had her dropped home in a car” he recalled.

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Continuing with his encounters with victims of COVID 19, Gupta said, “On November 9, last year, COVID patient Krishnanand Rai died. He was survived by  only an eighty-year-old father and a seven-year-old son and there was no one to perform his last rites. I stepped in to do them,” Gupta, who was looking after matters related to COVID patients in the district, told Gaon Connection.

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In the course of the pandemic, Gupta has cremated 30 bodies. 

It was not long before he and his family were also infected in the second wave.  

“My wife’s oxygen levels dropped, and I spent twenty eight thousand rupees to buy five remdesivir (emergency use medication) injections. Fortunately her condition improved after two injections,” Gupta said. The remaining three injections Gupta gave away free to another patient in the COVID ward, who urgently needed it, and a life was saved.

Impressed by Gupta’s charitable deeds, Adarsh Singh, Barabanki’s district magistrate appointed him as a coordinator.  He now acts as an interface between private hospitals and the district administration and ensures coordination between the two. 

Yamuna Prasad, superintendent of police,  Barabanki also acknowledged Gupta’s social service. “His contributions to public good are unprecedented. It is incredible that he puts others before himself.”

“The health officials are responsible for ensuring the well being of the citizens but Gupta has gone a step further and ensured the last rites of unclaimed people who die of COVID19. He helps the needy in every possible way. His work is an inspiration to society,” BKS Chauhan, the chief medical officer (CMO) of Barabanki, praised Gupta.

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Gupta’s desire to help the less fortunate goes back a long way. In fact, in 2005, when former president APJ Abdul Kalam visited Barabanki, he honoured him for having saved the lives of a family of four migrant labourers who were travelling in a bus from Mumbai to Barabanki, that met with an awful accident.  

When another family was travelling from Rae Bareilli to Barabanki on May 12, last year, their pick up truck met with an accident too. 

“A heavily pregnant woman somehow survived the accident, but her husband and their son died,” he recalled.  She suffered fractures in her arm and her leg and was taken to Lucknow’s King George’s Medical University (KGMU) where she also tested positive for COVID19. 

The woman could not be admitted at KGMU for her delivery as the entire hospital was a COVID facility and was advised to be taken to a hospital in Barabanki itself. 

“I arranged for her admission to Chandra Hospital in Barabanki where she gave birth to a child twenty days later,” he said.

In his 24 years of government service, charity and altruism have been at the forefront of Gupta’s life.  

“I joined the health department so that I could serve the people. I will not lose any opportunity to do so, even if it means putting my life at risk and spending my personal finances, stated Gupta adding that all he had left in his personal bank account was Rs 25,000. 

Read this report in Hindi