Padmanaban Gopalan, the founder of the NGO called No Food Waste starts his work at 6:00 am. He is in charge of the team that prepares and distributes 10,000 food packets in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. “The work goes on till 9:00 pm. My team distributed food in 39 spots today,” he says. He has been doing this in association with Coimbatore Corporation and an NGO called C4TN since the first day of the national lockdown. “I received calls asking for food. This is when I decided to work with the Government,” he says. No Food Waste now works from a kitchen in Town Hall. “We also have 13 partner kitchens around the city that is run by restaurant owners, caterers, colleges and other social service organisations. Together we form the Coimbatore Corporation Emergency Food Response Team.”
No Food Waste already has a database of economically underprivileged areas in the city that helped them to distribute the food. “The Corporation also helped them out with it,” says Padmanaban. “Most of the migrant labourers depended on their daily salary for food. With the industries shut down, they have no means to buy the essentials for their meals. Occasionally, some elderly people also request our help.”
The team has nine vans, three belonging to No Food Waste and the other six supplied by the Corporation.“We provide meals thrice a day, but the largest quantity of food is prepared for lunch,” he says. They have not set any standard menu. “It is made according to the availability of materials in each kitchen.
The Coimbatore Corporation Food Response team has 30 volunteers - 15 of them from No Food Waste and the other 15 from C4TN. “They are responsible for taking calls, procuring raw material and distributing food. The number of volunteers is limited to two per vehicle to ensure safety. They are equipped with masks, gloves and hand sanitisers. They are also asked to look out for symptoms and report ithem mmediately,” he explains.
They have tied up with whole-sale grocery vendors for their raw materials. “In our kitchen alone, we need 250 kg of rice, 75 kg of dal and 75 kg of vegetables every day. We rely on donations to cover the cost. The response has been positive so far. Recently, employees from a company chipped in and bought us 600 kg of rice. We had many families that contributed vegetables,” he says. The team is now on a mission to identify people without ration cards. “We will then supply them with food kits to last them for 20 days. I know it is going to be hard. But it is important.”
