Bollywood star Salman Khan is leading from the front, helping daily wage labourers in these tough times as the entire industry, as well as country, continues lockdown amid Covid-19 pandemic. General secretary of Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE) Ashok Dubey told SpotBoye in an interview, “Salman personally called me twice, to follow up, after his company’s CEO, Sameera Nambiar spoke to the Federation about Salman’s intent to help out the workers.”
“It’s been 2 years that I am the General Secretary of FWICE, and in these 2 years, Salman Khan has given around Rs 1.5 crore as help for the employees and workers of the federation,” he added.
Ashok had earlier told Hindustan Times that he had earlier shared account numbers of 19,000 daily wage workers to Salman as well as Yash Raj Films. YRF transferred money to 3,000 of these accounts. “Of the 25,000 -30,000 daily wage workers, we have procured account numbers for 19,000. We have shared the details with Salman Khan as well as Yash Raj Films as they have volunteered to help. YRF has transferred Rs 5,000 in 3,000 of these accounts. Rohit Shetty, Ajay Devgn and several others have donated funds to our federation,” he had said.
Ashok further told SpotBoye, “We then took out those 3,000 of the list and then later gave him a fresh list of 9,000 workers, making it 25,000 workers. He is supporting them for 2 months by giving Rs 6000 ( Rs 3,000 per month) per worker. The payments were all done once he got the full list.”
Ashok had earlier told HT that Salman was also helping women and senior workers who did not have personal bank accounts, “There are around 800 women workers with us and 40 of them do not have any bank accounts. We decided to build a separate database for them and sent them to Salman. There are people around the age of 70-80 who do not have bank accounts. We have procured account details of their relatives and sent them to Salman sir.”
