Things Are Going From Bad To Worse For Indira Canteens

Transcript:

We can all agree that everyone, irrespective of income or status, should have access to meals every day. But how do we achieve this?

In India, food subsidies have largely been the way to go.

You’ve heard of the Amma Canteen, for instance, an initiative of late Jayalalithaa, the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu and, back then, the AIADMK supremo. The Amma Canteen was a place where meals were available every day for a very cheap price.

In Karnataka, a similar initiative was launched in 2017, called the Indira Canteen, where subsidised meals were made available to the needy, mainly directed at the urban poor.

The plan, whose architect was Siddaramaiah’s Congress government, was to have one canteen in every Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike ward. The price of breakfast was set at as low as Rs 5, and lunch and dinner at Rs 10.

If you think of it, the idea sounds thoughtful and noble, and it was appreciated for what it was trying to achieve. But the canteens have dug themselves into one hole after another right from their inception.

Early on, Bengaluru residents who stayed near the upcoming canteens expressed displeasure as they felt that waste management would suffer and the traffic would go out of hand as a result of these units coming up in their neighbourhood.

Then, a week after the canteens began operating, media reporting indicated that these canteens were being run without the necessary Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) licences - which is embarrassing, apart from being illegal.

Licences are granted after Food Safety Department officials visit the establishment and inspect the food and hygiene standards - and for a facility that looks to serve meals to those in need, this step is critical. You can’t be running an establishment serving meals that could put people in hospitals. And this is especially true in reference to the urban poor, who rely on daily or weekly wages to keep their livelihood going.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ll notice that this has now come to bite them in their bottoms; the food has been flagged for poor quality in tests carried out by at least two labs, government-run Public Health Institute and Ramaiah Advanced Testing Laboratory. The presence of bacteria and fungus was reportedly detected in the food samples.

This is terrible. Yes, we must address the problem of universal accessibility to food, but meals shouldn’t be provided just for the heck of it - public health must assume top priority, especially when the government is at the helm.

But that’s what you get when you try to push through an initiative more for political gains than to genuinely support those who are struggling to make ends meet.

Thankfully, though, Bengaluru has many darshinis and other small eateries, including the street food stalls, that offer meals through the day. The prices here are certainly higher but still comparable to those at Indira Canteens.

And given that the food in the canteens is ‘unfit for consumption’, one might just be well-advised to try out other eateries… at least until we gain some clarity on the quality of food being offered in Indira Canteens.

Guess we’ll know soon with the BBMP sending food samples for testing to FSSAI labs. But who is to say that the government labs won’t come under pressure to give the meals a clean chit? Things just aren’t looking great.