We all have at sometime or the other looked at the streets that at daytime look the busiest. Traffic, shops, and scores of people in hurry make for a great combination! At night though, it is a different picture altogether. Recently, I was dropped home after attending a rather dull social gathering at around 12 at night. The tyres went bust on the highway, compounding our problems. My house is one of those which is not on the main road and neither does it have a pathway that can accommodate a car. This means that I actually have to walk around 20 feet, after getting down from the car. At night, it does give a shiver!

And that night as I was getting back, I witnessed something terrible. An old lady scrounging from a packet that smelled ghastly from 50 steps away. A child who stood beside her (maybe a relative) told her to put her hand deeper into the packet. The ordeal of braving the obnoxious smell, standing barefoot on wet ground and searching in the darkest of alleys were all just for a fistful of rice.

That’s depressing. It never bothered me till then that there are around 90 crore people in the world who are chronically hungry. To most of us these people are invisible till we encounter them. The next day, I did a few things. First I tried to find out who the lady and the child were. Nobody seemed to have a clue. Then I surfed the Internet to find and I came across an interesting Web page: http://sabkokhana.googlepages.com/home. Just to see that there was somebody who had felt the need to do something was sobering.

While there exists a view that farmers and governments should be looking at producing more food, the fundamental mistake with this perspective is that it is removed from reality. There is a lot of food. But why then is there hunger? The problem is with the delivery systems. Unequal distribution of money is another aspect. But first, what can we do collectively, as the sab ko khana (food for everyone) concept urges.

At my office, I was talking to a few of my colleagues over lunch. Charita Mathur did her M.A in Economics before joining our company. She said: “I am of the view that we should take a collective approach to achieve food security. Globally, enough food is produced to provide for the entire populace ensuring that everyone can be free of food shortage and fear of hunger.”

What we lack is a model. We will always have haves and have-nots. But there are some haves who care for the have-nots. Is price of food a factor? “Absolutely not Swati. Famished faces don’t want basoondhi or vegetable biriyani. Foodgrains are what they don’t have. There is a lot…somehow if we could engage in a collaborative effort,” feels Tilak Reddy, my other colleague who spent a better part of his childhood in a rural setting.

That one should live without enough food because of economic limitations or social disparities is a frightening thought. All of us give food to beggars. I once saw a beggar giving crumbs of bread to a mongrel. Sympathy is not an exclusive emotion of the content.

“What we need is to collect all these small acts of kindness into a bigger and better system. How much does a meal cost? Rs 8 or maybe 10. Can we subsidise the price of a meal to Rs 5?” asked social activist and my friend Priya Nair. Maybe we can.

This collective approach is often referred to as food justice. We cannot start something by crying hoarse over fairer distribution of food, ending chronic hunger and vilifying malnutrition. The focus must be on action and not merely on words

As Wikipedia suggests: “The core of the Food Justice movement is the belief that what is lacking is not food, but the political will to fairly distribute food regardless of the recipient’s ability to pay.”

The major problems that organisations around the world face when they try to feed hungry mouths are money, accountability and getting the right people. All these conditions are not mutually exclusive, which is why even if you have two — the absence of the third can virtually destroy all the effort.

“We can start a small outfit by feeding people in our own locality. How? We could start something like a calorie credit. People who donated could have credits that would give them the right to feed as many people that they want. So like you Swati, with a onetime donation of Rs 500, you could feed the old lady and the small child for a month. This is of course if a meal can be made at a price of Rs 10 or something.” Brilliant idea Sethuka! She is my immediate boss and I am proud to have somebody like her.

Ramesh chipped in. “It would be simple. Have a cook with a monthly pay. Start off from a small kitchen. Make some rice, pulses, a vegetable. First you make 20 meals, then 40…let scaling up be gradual.” Don’t hurry in the mad frenzy of scaling up, feeding 40 people everyday for a month is no mean feat, remarked my colleague Ramesh.

But how to collect that money, I was about to finish my question when Sriram Lagoo (not the famous director) our IT guy stepped in. At one corner of his laptop, we opened a small site called www.foodforall.org. This is the same Web site the sab ko khana Web page author had talked about as his inspiration.

“We are a non-profit fundraising organisation dedicated to putting an end to the hunger crisis on both national and international fronts. In order to accomplish this goal, Food For All enlists the support of the US food industry and consumers nationwide to raise money for anti-hunger agencies all across the country and around the globe,” read the ‘about us’ section.

Sriram then took us to another section of the same page. “Our primary fundraiser, the retail point-of-purchase program (POP), appears at over 8,000 retail locations nationwide.

Boards with $1, $3, and $5 donation coupons are displayed at the grocery checkout stand, customers select their chosen donation, hand the coupon to the cashier, and the amount is added to their final grocery bill…Alongside the POP programme, Food For All also raises funds through manufacturer cause-marketing promotions and charitable sporting events…Through all of our fundraising ventures, Food For All has raised over $53 million since our organisation’s inception in 1985.”

We can take the short route though. Gifting a meal to around ten kids in Africa this Christmas and making the load of not doing anything a little less heavy. Americans spend $4 billion on Christmas gifts each year. Maybe we do just a fraction of it. That’s not the point.

The real point is giving gifts to people who already have something. And let there be anyone who dare say that his or her gifts are cheap. They are not. Charity may help selfish short-term interests but cannot be a solution. A solution is always long term.

I hate to say this but I don’t want readers this time to send me their blessings, congratulations and telling me how my research was good. It will not make any difference to those who are the subject of my article. I would be happier if we could really start something. Let this not be another article written in vain. If you have an idea that could make this collaborative effort to provide food for all in India work, make yourself heard and read.

* * * * *

Letters received to Episode-170 on the issue: ‘Debt-trap and beyond...” (Business Line, December 17.)

Hi! I read your piece “Debt-trap and beyond...” and I found it extremely interesting and relevant in today’s world.

I have been meeting lots of youngsters who have more liabilities than assets.

This is mostly because they don’t borrow with an intension to create an asset. There are several people who belong to the high-income group but still come under the negative net-worth category.

Youngsters who earn more than Rs 10 lakh per annum often come under this category. They are the target audience for lifestyle products, where they are asked to buy the products now and pay later. People with high salaries and disposal income often struggle to manage their surplus income.

You need different set of skills for making money and managing money. Youngsters must be taught to spend prudently and so that they don’t get into the debt-trap.

Hoping to get your views and continuing discussion on subject...

Gaurav Mashruwala, Mumbai

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