How Robin Hood Army Ensures Every Meal Counts, Every Stomach Fed, And Food Isn’t Wasted 

India is a country of rich heritage with abundant culture, boast-worthy and flavorful cuisines. The history of Indian food reflects a journey through time, blending ancient traditions with new influences, making it one of the most diverse and celebrated culinary indulgences in the world.

Yet, we are grappling with a serious issue that impacts nearly 23 crore people living in the country — food waste.

This alarming amount of food that is getting wasted every single day in a country where millions of people still go to bed hungry each night is an appalling reality, that demands our immediate attention and action. We have come a long way from famine and malnutrition, still more could be done on the ground. 

Here are some hard hitting facts:

Volume of Waste: India generates approximately 67 million metric tons of food waste each year. This accounts for about 40% of the total food produced, making it one of the highest contributors to global food wastage.

Economic Loss: The financial impact of food waste in India is substantial, estimated at around ₹620,000 crores (approximately $80 billion USD) annually. This loss affects farmers, businesses, and consumers alike.

Global Context: Compared to other countries, India’s food waste percentage is high, though the absolute volume is lower than in more populous nations like China and the United States.

The good news is that there are several NGO’s working on solutions to address these issues and the Robin Hood Army (RHA) is one of them.

The RHA is a volunteer based, zero-funds organization that works to get surplus food from restaurants and the community to serve less fortunate people. The model is a hyper local one, and the “Robins” are largely the students and young working professionals in the particular area — everyone does this in their free time. The lesser fortunate sections of society served include homeless families, orphanages, patients from public hospitals, and old age homes.

The above gives an idea about the phenomenal growth of RHA through the years. It’s an ongoing and continuous journey, with progress made in leaps and bounds till date.

Now, my personal association with the RHA has been since 2019. I wanted to share some of our recent work for the past four months with the Compass company, who provide catering services to several multi national companies in Bangalore.

It was a wonderful opportunity that came to us when we were asked to help out distributing the excess cafeteria lunch and dinner everyday from a local office. Our volunteers planned out a detailed schedule and started right away. 

Some of the challenges we faced initially and still do are:

• Since the food is given to us hot and fresh, and sometimes large in quantity, we have to make sure it’s delivered on time without any spoilage. We have to be mindful of the fact that the people that take the food don’t have access to proper healthcare, so the onus falls on us to make sure that it’s not stale.
• Based on the quantity, we have to chart out distribution points, based on location and number of people living there. There are many cluster homes housing migrant clusters, but they all vary in numbers from 20-300 families. One thing we make sure is go with enough food to give everyone.  
• Some days, we have a lot of food, but some other donor may have given them sumptuous lunch. It’s a good problem in a way, but since there is no storage space or a refrigerator to keep the food in these cluster homes, we have to rework our routes and go elsewhere. 
• On working weekdays, finding volunteers to pick up food late afternoon and night has been and is still a huge challenge. 

At the end of the day though, all of the above hurdles vanishes and melts away, when we go out there and see the kids have a huge smile on their faces as they eat. It’s not just another basic survival meal, but, having restaurant style exotic dishes like biryani, paneer dishes, delicious veggies, healthy dal etc are literally a luxury treat to these munchkins.

I’m also coming up with a few take away moments in my experience so far. So many times, the folks only take what they can eat and say, “Please don’t give more, it will get wasted.” How good it would be if all of us practice this minimalistic attitude. Such a simple concept, but makes a profound impact.  

Also, it’s very interesting to note that when we served some of these dishes initially, there was a lot of resistance because it was sadly a new sensory experience, alien to the tongue. We had to give a talk to the mothers about how important vegetables are to the kids’ health etc. It is still a challenge but lot of slow and steady improvements with the intake. 

______________________________________________

Jayashree Srikanth lived in the United States for 16 years, then moved to Bangalore with her husband and two daughters. She is a proud homeschooler of a special needs kid, who has a successful art career and has won several awards including carrying the torch for the Rio Paralympics, in 2015. Her younger daughter graduated from UCLA and is now working for a healthcare startup in Chicago.