• A journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step.” Managing trustee Kishan Jain and others at RYA Metro, particularly those associated with its flagship Chennai Food Bank project, have their own, home-grown version of that popular saying, which originated from China. For them, it goes: “A distribution of four crore meals begins with a fistful of rice.”
  • While mentioning how Chennai Food Bank has distributed four crore meals over the last 28 years, he harks back to the time when the initiative was growing out of fists. “We started a ‘muthi bhar anaj’ (fistful of rice) initiative 28 years ago. We distributed 2000 boxes, each with a capacity of five kilos to 2000 houses.. “They were told that whenever they start having their meal, they should think of those people who cannot afford a square meal and put a fistful of rice in that box. In a month, it would get filled up. We would have our van collect the rice boxes. Cleaning and packing the rice, we would distribute it to the needy. We would give it to the orphanages, every month some 10,000 kilos. During the pandemic, we could not continue with this initiative. Nobody would entertain our people who would go with this request. We converted that scheme to Sponsor A Child, which will take care of the child’s need for foodgrains for a year at ₹2000. As rice makes up the major part of our foodgrains programme, that amount is sufficient. Around 60 kilos of rice is required for a child for a year.”