The State Security Mission (SSM) will soon approach all types of donors including corporate houses, shop owners and the general public, to strengthen its corpus fund, so that it could effectively implement various schemes, including the cochlear implantation.

SSM expects to scale up its corpus fund to a minimum Rs 100 crore from the current Rs 64 crore. SSM regional director Major Dinesh Bhaskaran said SSM expected to receive Rs 89 crore from high-profile donors. Of the SSM’s current corpus fund, Rs 25 crore has been provided by district, block and grama panchayats based on a government directive. District panchayats contributed Rs 10 lakh each while the rest contributed Rs 5 and Rs 1 lakh each respectively.

“We took this decision because cochlear implant programme this year aims to cover 200 children between the age of one and three years. We’ll need to spend about Rs 7 crore for this,” Dinesh said. As part of the fund-raising efforts, SSM will mobilize 400 to 500 school and college students in each district beginning with Kannur on Friday.

This, in the second leg, would get replicated in Thiruvananthapuram city, during the first week of February. SSM also expects to rake-in a substantial amount through stamps which are being sold in the post offices in Rs 10, Rs 50 and Rs 100 denominations.

“Thus, we expect `11 crore, taking the total to `100 crore,” said Dinesh.

He said SSM received a huge number of applications for the cochlear implant programme announced by the government.

“But, not many were in proper format. So, we recently issued a proper application form,” he said. SSM, so far, has received 158 applications in the prescribed format, of which 69 are from the age group of 0 to 3 years.