Kerala actors body plans fund-raising for welfare schemes

The new office-bearers of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (AMMA) are mulling ways to raise funds to continue their monthly pension scheme for ailing artistes, said its president Innocent on Sunday.

"We provide a monthly pension of Rs.5,000 to about 105 members and we have decided that to sustain this, additional funds should be raised and for that, we have in mind a few schemes," he said after a meeting here.

Innocent, who won the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Chalakudy as a Left-supported independent candidate, has been AMMA president since 2000 and was re-elected unopposed to another three year stint.

"Innocent has been doing a commendable job... he has the knack of carrying all the artistes together without any problem and hence everyone is only glad that he is continuing as the president," said an AMMA member who did not wish to be identified.

Superstar Mammootty took over as the general secretary while his 'arch rival' superstar Mohanlal was nominated as a vice president.

The new committee decided to weigh various options on the way to raise funds and among those discussed were to either act in a film or hold stage shows or produce TV serials.

"Since this was the first meeting of the new committee, issues were just taken up and we did not go into the details. We will have another meeting next month, when we will finalise what we will be doing to raise funds," committee member Maniyanpillai Raju told IANS.

Of the 460 members, Sunday's meeting was attended by 266.

For the first fund-raising event, AMMA members had in 2008 acted free of cost in film "Twenty 20". This turned out to be a blockbuster hit and raked in millions of rupees that were used to fund welfare schemes of AMMA.