Priyanka Gandhi to telecom operators: Make outgoing and incoming calls free for a month

Amid the Covid-19 lockdown, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi wrote a letter to all major telecom operators such as Reliance Jio, Airtel, BSNL and Vodafone-Idea on Sunday, urging them to waive off call fee for one month.

Saying that ‘it is our responsibility to help fellow citizens in the time of crisis’, she said this step was necessary as thousands of migrant workers are trying to reach their hometowns across the country.

“I am writing this on humanitarian grounds,” she said in her letter, written in Hindi, on Sunday.

“Many of those who are trying to reach home have exhausted their mobile recharges as a result of which they are not able to contact their families,” added Priyanka Gandhi.

She then requested the telecom companies to make all incoming and outgoing calls free for one month.

Priyanka Gandhi had on Saturday also appealed to the Yogi Adityanath-led UP government to provide all kind of help including food and transportation to the distressed migrants.

She has also appealed to Congress workers to provide help to the daily-wages workers who fled the Capital city, following an unplanned lockdown announced by the PM on March 24.

Meanwhile, it has come to the light that worried about large-scale movement of people triggering a risk of mass-transmission, the central government ordered sealing of all state and district borders on Sunday and said violators would face a 14-day mandatory quarantine.

Various state governments also appealed to the migrant workers to stay put and announced special measures for providing food and other facilities to them.