MUMBAI: In a country where millions of people go hungry every day, a retired IPS officer has come up with an initiative to feed the needy. The initiative, called ‘Roti Bank’, collects leftovers from restaurants, clubs and parties in Mumbai, stores it in vans and distributes it to the poor before the food gets stale.
Launched by Maharashtra’s former Director General of Police D Sivanandan in December last year in collaboration with the Mumbai’s famous tiffin carriers ‘Dabbawalas’, the ‘Roti Bank’ claims to be getting a good response. A Mumbai-born and London-based business professional, Nitin Khanapurkar, had also chipped in to support the cause by launching a round-the-clock helpline number for it. Nearly 1.8 lakh tonnes of food is wasted every day in India and around 20 crore people, of whom a big number is in Mumbai, go hungry, Sivanandan told PTI.
“Since legal issues restrict eateries from distributing the leftover food to outsiders, we thought of channelising it though our NGO, and I am happy to say that our initiative of ‘Roti Bank’ has received an unprecedented response from various quarters,” he said. “We are a food rescue organisation. We collect the leftover food from hotels and cafeterias and distribute it to the hungry people. It is a simple concept,” he said.
As part of the initiative, two GPRS-equipped vans make rounds of streets near hospitals and slums to provide food to the needy people, he said.