Help Small Businesses

Many Shopkeepers and staff workers are in financial distress due to Covid-19 Lockdown.

Small Businesses Need Help

As India and countries all around the world are under lockdown in response to COVID-19, small businesses are among the worst hit. Shopkeepers and staff workers have suddenly lost a reliable income. Our small businesses need us now more than ever. Even though we cant leave home, we could still support local businesses through donations.

If you'd like to support the staff of a particular small business, you can find them below and contribute to them directly.

Tell me more...

India has entered a 21 day lockdown on the midnight of March 25 in order to halt the spread of the coronavirus. Several other countries aroud the world have taken up similar measures. While this is prudent from a public health perspective, these closures will have a real and immediate economic impact to service workers across industries.

Restaurants have tons of fixed costs: rent, labor, loan repayments, insurance, supplies, repairs – the list goes on. Even successful restaurants have razor thin margins of 3-5%, and a third have struggled to pay employees at least once. The “shelter-in-place” ordinance keeping customers at home could tip the balance into bankruptcy.

Barclays said the cumulative shutdown cost will be around $120 billion, or 4 per cent of GDP. Of this $120 billion, the new shutdown assumptions account for roughly $90 billion of additional impact. “This would roughly translate to around 2 percentage points of a loss in output, and as a result, we are shaving down our CY2020 GDP forecast from 4.5 per cent to 2.5 per cent and FY20-21 forecast to 3.5 per cent from 5.2 per cent earlier,” it said.

India announced an economic stimulus package worth 1.7 trillion rupees ($22.5 billion) on March 26, designed to help millions of low-income households cope with a 21-day lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak. The package will be disbursed through food security measures for poor households and through direct cash transfers, said India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

While the government is doing its best to help, we believe we can do more to help those affected, and are raising funds to be distributed to all the businesses affected by this public health crisis.

We cannot all be working alongside all of the heroic healthcare workers testing and treating coronavirus patients, but our goal with this project is to enable every citizen to do something today to mitigate the economic impact suffered by a huge number of service workers.

Add a Business

Tell your favorite local businesses to register on socialnet.hyd so we can all support their staff.

If you own or operate a business affected by Covid-19, fill out this form to register your business for listing + relief. Businesses have a choice to register for Donation only or Donation+Discount which would allow the contributers to avail a discount of 50% of the amount donated. We believe that this would encourage more people to donate as they would be getting a discount in return when the store opens after the lockdown.