Friends build a house for their schoolmate who lost home to Gaja

Friends build a house for their schoolmate who lost home to Gaja

Vincent.Arockiaraj@timesgroup.com

Pudukottai:20.11.2020

A group of friends built a house for a schoolmate, who lost his residence to cyclone Gaja. M Muthukumar, a 44-year-old truck driver of Machuvadi in Pudukottai, had been struggling due to the lockdown.

The 1984-92 batch of TELC Higher Secondary School mobilized ₹1.5 lakh for the project using a WhatsApp group. It was M Nagendran, a businessman, who set the project in motion.

Muthukumar, the sole breadwinner of a family of seven, has been staying in a partially damaged tent since the cyclone struck the area in 2018. “Had my friends not helped me, we could not have slept peacefully during the recent rain that lashed across the district,” Muthukumar told TOI. “Since my earnings were not even enough to feed my family, I could not even think about repairing the house. I thought of applying for a house under PMKisan scheme. But for that too, I should have some cash in my hand.”

Nagendran happened to meet Muthukumar in September and on noticing the damaged hut his friend stayed at, decided to construct a house for him “I left the place without telling anything, formed a WhatsApp group and managed to add 60 batchmates. I expressed my idea and all of them swung into action immediately. Within 50 days, we completed the asbestos house and handed it over to my friend’s family before Diwali,” Nagendran said.