Corpn cooks up plan to beat hunger pangs in city

Nivedha Selvam | Apr 6, 2020, 04:47 IST

Coimbatore: The helpline of the Emergency Food Response Team (EFRT) of the city corporation rang early on Sunday afternoon.
Moments after the brief call informing about a group of people stranded without food at Malumichampatti ended, the volunteers sprung into action.
Within two hours, a van carrying packets of food rushed to Malumichampatti, where several people waited for their first meal of the day.
EFRT, a joint effort of the city corporation and a dozen organisations including No Food Waste, Coimbatore for Tamil Nadu (C4TN) and the District Catering Association, has been feeding 15,000 people every day since the lockdown. It has identified 50 hunger spots in the city, where street dwellers, guest workers and destitutes are concentrated. While some the hunger spots are static, some change from day to day.
Though other civic bodies in the state have also come up with similar distress mitigation efforts along with NGOs, EFRT has a more structured model in feeding the needy during the lockdown.
While the city corporation’s role is coordinating, helping them with logistics and facilitating flow of fund and provisions, about 40 volunteers attend distress calls, verify them and assessing the need, reach out to patrons to rope in professional cooks and also ensure quality of food.
The menu includes variety rice, dosa and chapati. They also serve coffee, tea and snacks.
EFRT uses nine vehicles and 18 people for food distribution. It provides one-time meal for 12,000 people and twice for 3,000 people.
The team members say they have served 1.12 lakh plates of food to the people till Sunday since the lockdown. On average, the team has been serving about 15,000 plates every day and on Sunday, the numbers spiked to 21,990 plates.
“Roping in professionals, we have been cooking meals for over 5,000 people every day at two centralized community kitchens at Town Hall and Singanallur. We also receive food from our supporting kitchens,” says founder of No Food Waste Padmanaban Gopal, who is coordinating the project. Several trusts, associations and companies have extended support either by setting up support kitchens or by making donations in the form of money and products.
“When the community kitchens were set up 10 days ago, we received over 700 calls per day. After we promised to provide food on a daily basis, the numbers came down to 250 – 300. More than 50% of the calls are from daily wage labourers in slum areas in the city and 30% of them are senior citizens,” says Bala, a volunteer.
The team has also been distributing grocery kits consisting of 14 products including rice, oil, dal, potatoes and tomatoes to the economically weaker sections of the society. They have identified over 1,000 such families in the city.