New Delhi, Apr 7 (IANS): Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji, philanthropist and Chairperson of Arghyam, Rohini Nilekani, and Vidya Shah, CEO of EdelGive Foundation, have issued a joint appeal to CSR foundations and philanthropic organisations to urgently come together and focus on protecting the most vulnerable people affected by the coronavirus crisis in India.

They have called for extraordinary and urgent measures to address the emerging crisis in the immediate term and over the long run.

"As funders rally around the public health response and drug development, we must also help workers and their families ensure they can continue to put food on the table and weather the economic and social storm that lies ahead," they stated in the joint appeal.

The appeal underlines the need for CSR foundations and philanthropic organisations in India to join hands for a two-fold response to the global health pandemic. In the immediate term, it invited the large donor community in India to pledge for providing more effective support and strengthen their civil society partners by introducing flexibilities and undertaking measures in their grant-making and monitoring mechanisms.

The flexibility measures include things like loosening or eliminating the restrictions on current grants, converting project-based grants to a framework funding or unrestricted support, accelerating payment schedules, and not holding grantees responsible if conferences, events and other project deliverables are postponed or cancelled.

It also called for making new grants as unrestricted as possible, so that the non-profit partners have maximum flexibility to respond to this crisis.