DHARAMSALA (HP), Mar 31:
The Dalai Lama has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing his support to the measures being taken by India, within the country and among SAARC nations, to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
The Tibetan spiritual leader also made a donation from his trust to the PM CARES Fund, created to enable people to contribute to the Government’s containment and relief measures against the COVID-19 outbreak. His staff members too donated a day’s salary to the corpus, according to the Dalai Lama’s office.
The Dalai Lama said the fund will provide “urgently needed assistance” to the people facing hardships due to an ongoing nationwide lockdown imposed to combat the virus. In a letter to Modi on Tuesday, the Dalai Lama said, “I appreciate the enormous challenges that this crisis poses to the world community and the need for strict measures to be taken to meet them.”
“I would like to thank you for the initiative that you have taken in partnership with other SAARC countries to set up an emergency fund and to exchange information, knowledge and expertise to tackle the spread of COVID-19. Such collaboration will also create a model for dealing with similar problems in the future,” he wrote to the prime minister.
At an India-initiated video conference of SAARC leaders on March 15, Modi suggested that health professionals of the member nations could come together to jointly fight against the coronavirus pandemic. He also proposed setting up an emergency fund. India has also proposed setting up of a common electronic platform for all SAARC nations to share expertise and best practices to jointly combat the spread of coronavirus. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is a regional grouping comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. (PTI)
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