Where are the subsidised canteens?

More than nine months after the Aam Aadmi Party government announced setting up of Aam Aadmi Canteens in the city, a scheme inspired by Tamil Nadu’s highly subsidised Amma canteens, the proposal is yet to get off the ground.

Ashish Khetan, vice-chairman of the Delhi Dialogue Commission (DDC) — an advisory body to the government that drafted the proposal, had announced on July 16 last year that the first few canteens would become operational within ‘two months and possibly before Independence day’, but not a single outlet has come up till date.

Even as the Delhi government has allocated Rs. 10 crore for the scheme, officials say that work on the project is still on.

Calls and text messages to Mr. Khetan went unanswered.

One of his close aides, tasked with handling the media, said the ‘work is on’ and a formal announcement would be made ‘as and when’ there are concrete developments.

As per the proposal, the canteens will serve ‘nutritious and delicious’ meals for Rs. 5 to Rs. 10.

The canteens will especially cater to the estimated 10 lakh construction workers, hawkers and families living in JJ clusters, and students of technical institutes.

Each canteen is billed to cater to around 3,000 to 5,000 people. As per the government’s findings, Tamil Nadu spends around Rs. 65 crore annually on running it 225 Amma canteens.

Meanwhile, the status of the ‘Jan Aahar Yojana’ is still not clear and whether the eateries opened by the erstwhile Congress government continue operation.

On July 16, when Mr. Khetan had announced the Aam Aadmi canteens scheme, he had said that the Jan Aahar experiment was not good. “The quality of food was poor and hygiene was not being maintained.”