Disaster relief requires the presence of mind and inventiveness that define modern-day T20 batsmanship. When runs dry up, unlikely shots are pulled out of thin air. An unconventional batter may be sent out of turn, in the place of a top-order batsman. Quick thinking of this kind has turned hopeless situations into victory laps.
A November 7-12 feeding initiative by the Chennai Food Bank of Rajasthan Youth Association Metro in association with the Jain Annapurna Trust TN got this figured out. The food preparation and distribution initiative, flagged off by member of parliament MK Kanimozhi, was being operated from a massive but temporary kitchen that was hurriedly raised at the Jain temple on GN Chetty. At one point, it was hit by the situation whose fallout it was trying to address. With the waters rising on the temple premises, the chances of continuing the kitchen looked bleak. Instead of a tame ending, the initiative took a new turn, one that led it into a space a few streets away. Without any disruption, the kitchen was carted overnight into the residence of a Rajasthan Youth Association Metro member at Nana Street in T Nagar. The resultant situation was a rare fusion between the sizzle of frying pans and the roar of engines.
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The spacious car park at the member’s home became the kitchen, Kishan Jain, managing trustee of RYA Metro, reveals a tidbit of the inside story behind a drive that fed 60,000 hungry mouths during the recent Chennai rains.
Twenty-eight-years-old, RYA Metro’s Chennai Food Bank is synonymous with its long-term initiative, which is that of sustaining needy families through distribution of foodgrains. However, it also comfortably shifts into a shorter format — disaster relief.
Kishan puts it down to its ability to raise a temporary community kitchen within hours. Its two hundred members make this feat possible — the Nana Street episode seems to be just one of many illustrations of this commitment. Besides, there is a team of cooks from Sowcarpet that makes itself available during any calamity that requires meal preparation and distribution. He discloses that from November 7 to 12, ten cooks were putting in an 18-hour shift every day.
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“In 2015, we scaled up the meal distribution exercise. In the first wave of the pandemic, for six months, we were distributing lakhs of meals to migrant workers through Greater Chennai Corporation. We also adopted a few wards at the Omandurar government hospital, running a food counter that catered to the attenders of those admitted in the facility.”
In exercises that require the succour to be reached and distributed, it has relied on a handful of voluntary organisations, including Red Cross; or on government line agencies such as the Greater Chennai Corporation. In most situations, it would lean heavily on its members, who number around 200.
In the November 7-12 drive, it explored the Fibonacci-series effect of social media sharing, with results that encourage it to make the one-off experiment a habitual response.
“We put out a request on Facebook that we are preparing meals at a kitchen, and whoever would like to take the food and distribute it to the rain-hit, could come and collect it from us. That request brought 22 NGOs into the picture. Through them we managed to reach every nook and corner of Chennai, which includes reaching the needy with food packets in Pulianthope, using boats.”
- 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.”
With a network of volunteering groups, there was more sharing and the aroma of the initiative spread wider.
“On the first day, we made 5,000 meals. On the last day, which was November 12, we made 20,000 meals. As the people came to know that someone is providing food they started coming here. With many of the volunteers who were distributing the meals telling us that in most of the places, normality had returned, we ended the initiative on November 12.”
On whether the RYA Metro would be open to having more volunteers on board for disaster relief, Kishan notes: “We run our office at a building that we own, at Saravana Mudali Street in T Nagar. Anyone who wants to volunteer with us during such crises can head to our office and have themselves registered with us.”
Contact RYA Metro at 044- 4212 8153 / 2431 2096