Sonu Sood

Sonu Sood is a film actor, best known for antagonist roles in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil cinema, who became one of India's most visible private relief organisers during the COVID-19 pandemic. He runs the Sood Charity Foundation from Mumbai, and has written about the pandemic work in a 2020 memoir, I Am No Messiah.

The relief effort began in May 2020, when the nationwide lockdown stranded migrant workers far from home with no transport. Sood arranged buses, special trains and chartered flights to return them, and extended the same approach to Indians stuck abroad: in July 2020 he chartered a flight carrying more than 1,500 students from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan to Varanasi, and in August that year brought 101 medical students home from Moscow to Chennai. Smaller interventions followed the same pattern of responding to individual appeals — after a video circulated in July 2020 of a farmer's daughters pulling a plough in place of bullocks, he sent the family a tractor. He then tried to make the ad hoc response systematic, launching Pravasi Rojgar, a website and app matching returned migrant workers to jobs, and in February 2021 Ilaaj India, a platform to connect people needing medical treatment with care. During the second wave in 2021 he supplied oxygen plants and cylinders to hospitals.

The Sood Charity Foundation carries the work into education and health. It funds coaching for candidates from low-income households sitting the civil services examination, and runs SANKALP, a free preparation programme for the CLAT and AILET law entrance examinations aimed at closing the gap between able but unsupported candidates and the national law schools. The foundation reports supporting dialysis, cardiac surgery and paediatric treatment cases alongside its education projects, and set up a helpline after the 2023 Balasore train collision in Odisha. In August 2021 the Delhi government named Sood the face of its Desh ke Mentor scheme, which pairs professionals with government school students.

In September 2020 the United Nations Development Programme gave Sood its SDG Special Humanitarian Action Award for the pandemic work.[2][3][4]