Khaana Chahiye? (Do you need food?), by Swaraj Shetty, Mumbai
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Born, raised, and currently residing in Mumbai, Maharashtra, Swaraj is a digital marketer working on communication, tech, and civic engagement campaigns.
One April night at 1 a.m., while I was replying to food requests, a ground volunteer sent this message on an internal WhatsApp group:
while u sleep tonight, thousands sleep hungry in the city that never sleeps
A few weeks earlier, on the 29th of March, we had started distributing meals to people living under the flyovers on the western express highway. Small kids had not eaten for days. We pooled the initial funds raised and created digital channels to gather requests for food.
In the first 10 days, we were overwhelmed. Ground intelligence showed that the actual demand was 50 times greater than we had anticipated. The lockdown kept extending, and the incoming requests rose exponentially. By mid-April, we were only able to serve 20 percent of them.
That WhatsApp message made me feel helpless.
I thought, How can we serve so few people?
But the message also charged all of us up. Witnessing the desperation on the ground drove all the volunteers to do more, in spite of the risks of exposure to the coronavirus.
By the end of April, we had created a framework to identify demand, arrange supply, and distribute food to each and every corner of the city. We started crowdsourcing hunger data and marrying it with food supply, by activating a network of dormant restaurant kitchens.
And the city became a part of our work: multiple citizen projects started, with students, housewives, and more creating sketches and digital avatars, doing stand-up comedy, singing, dancing, and writing poems to support our fundraising drive.
In six months, our community-driven campaign reached 20 million people online and provided 4.75 million meals. We fed the needy, especially migrant workers, during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis. The city that never sleeps ensured that no one slept hungry. All of this was powered by the kindness, hard work, and bravery of the citizens of Mumbai.
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(This story was prepared for an “Imagine Another World” online storytelling workshop held October 28, 2020.)
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