Protesting wrestlers at Jantar Mantar in the national capital, against the Wrestling Federation of India’s (WFI) sidelined chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, have turned to crowdfunding in order to continue their fight.
Wrestlers have opted to accept donations in cash only, due to fears of online fraud, with a set up at the protest camp and a senior India wrestling coach, who has maintained a ledger. In four days, after launching the crowdfunding drive, INR 6 lakh have been raised with contributions coming mostly from supporters of the protest.
“We have so far collected around Rs 6 lakh in four days through crowdfunding. Our funds had started to dry up, so we thought of this campaign. We are overwhelmed by the support the people of this country have extended to our movement,” a protesting wrestler told TOI.
“We started the movement with a corpus of Rs 24 lakh. We knew we would be at Jantar Mantar for several days but didn’t expect it to be this long. We have spent Rs 20 lakh so far. The rest of the amount (Rs 4 lakh) was not sufficient to run the movement given the huge costs involved. So, we decided to launch the crowdfunding initiative,” added the wrestler.
In the report by TOI, the wrestler even broke up the daily expenses at the protest site.
“We spend anywhere between Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 1.8 lakh daily. We cater to 800-1,000 supporters daily and accordingly plan for their water and food requirements. We spend around Rs 90,000 on water bottles and Rs 60,000 on preparing food three times a day cooked in desi ghee – for our supporters, apart from other miscellaneous expenses. We only use packaged drinking water and hygienically-cooked home food to avoid any chances of stomach infection.”
As for the likes of Olympians Bajrang Punia, Vinesh Phogat and Sakshee Malikkh are getting homecooked food delivered from Vinesh’s husband’s family in Delhi.
“All these top wrestlers get their breakfast, lunch and dinner from Vinesh’s husband Somvir Rathi’s family in Delhi. Somvir goes to pick up the food from his cousin sister’s house. There’s always this fear of Singh’s men implicating these wrestlers in false cases of doping by spiking their food,” the wrestler said.
“For the supporters, we have turned a wrestler friend’s ground floor space at his house in Delhi into a makeshift kitchen,” the wrestler added.
The wrestler also clarified that the surplus amount from the crowd-funding, once the protest is over, would be given away as prize money at dangals in Haryana.
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