• -

Article

  1. Home
  2. Article

Feeding the Hungry – A New Initiative

Oct, 22, 2018 788 views 0 Comments

India is a land of strange paradoxes!

As per the Global Hunger Index published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhlife 31 percent of our children face serious hunger. India’s rank in GHI is 139 among 189 countries surveyed. Yet in any big hotels and restaurants families may spend anything up to twenty to thirty thousand rupees on food and drinks in a single evening!

One of my most painful memories in life is a relative’s marriage function fifteen years back, where a mini truck load of leftover food was buried in the middle of the night because there were no takers for it. I had attended the wedding reception of their daughter a few hours back and was shocked to find around fifteen items of starters including fish fry, chicken tikka, egg chop and chilly prawn. In the main course there must have been around twenty items led by mutton curry, mustard fish, butter chicken and prawn curry with heaps of pulao, biriyani and fried rice. I was told that at midnight almost half the food was left unused. They knocked at the doors of an orphanage and a school for the handicapped to give away the food. At one place the watchman did not open the door and at the other he gave them a mouthful of gaalis with choicest abusive words. Since the venue was a municipality Kalyan Madap, they had to clean up the place before morning. So with great difficulty they could manage to locate a mini truck, dump the erstwhile delicious food as garbage, take it to the outskirts and paid exorbitant wages to four labourers to dig a huge pit to bury the food.

After that day every time I see a hungry child in the street begging for food or rummaging garbage for some left over eatable, my heart cries out for the colossal waste of food in our restaurants, hotels, marriage parties and other get-togethers. It is heartening to note that in Indore a small group has devised an App to collect information on leftover excess food and distribute it to the needy. The enclosed video clip is an eye-opener.

There are similar initiatives in a few other places. Just click on the following link to know about them.    

https://www.thebetterindia.com/46855/where-to-donate-excess-food-to-after-party/

Here is to wish that this initiative is replicated in every town in India!

Dr. Mrutyunjay Sarangi

 

Feeding the Hungry



Viewers Comments

  • Dr Jayashri Pandya

    What you say is definately true. It happens much more than we imagine. But now days at the weddings; it is a practice to inform some NGO beforehand. Thus food does not go waste

    Dec, 23, 2018
  • Amlan Priyadarshi

    Commendable initiative. In the world of twenty first century there are more obese people than hungry people. It is indeed ironic that obesity is spreading like a life disease even as many people have no access to food. In Delhi itself three young girls died of starvation because they did not have food to it even as they had received some money from the Government as part of direct cash deliver scheme. Right to food flows from right to life. By wasting food we certainly take forward the cause of right to life. In fact Mahatma Gandhi had said that even God would not appear before the hungry and famished people except in the form of food and wages. So if some one is taking food to the hungry and famished then he is taking forward the cause of spirituality as well.

    Oct, 27, 2018

Leave a Reply