It has been over a year of providing meals to hunger-stricken families across the country. When Feeding India launched the Daily Feeding Program in January’21, its primary focus was to eradicate hunger and in parallel, reduce the financial burden on its beneficiaries. 

Last year, we started with delivering around 3,000 meals in January’21 and scaled it to close to one lakh meals in less than nine months. 

Nearly six months in, Feeding India (FI) has doubled its impact. Currently, we are relentlessly serving over two lakh meals daily across 39 cities in India. A milestone credited to not just the FI team but also the 145+ local NGO partners and numerous individuals and corporations passionate for the cause.

Lessons to shape the next FI chapter 

Having now served over 420 lakh meals last year, we find ourselves in a better position to understand the problem of hunger and malnutrition in India. Additionally, our interactions and learnings on ground are helping shape the future initiatives of FI. A few observations worth sharing with you all are listed below:

• Nutrition is a critical component of a meal, especially for child-bearing beneficiaries
• Understanding the nutritional requirements of a lactating or pregnant mother – from the moment they conceive a child and till the child breastfeeds – is imperative to plan a better composition of the meal provided.
• While FI caters to beneficiaries of all ages, a sharper focus on women and children (especially up to two years of age) is sacrosanct towards eliminating malnutrition in India

Another valuable learning was that unless malnutrition is tackled, low income groups will remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and chronic illnesses. 

We realise that to maximise impact for as many beneficiaries as possible, our purpose has to evolve to solve for – not only hunger, but also malnutrition and poverty. 

The way forward 

These insights provide a strong case for designing a new and refined action plan to reduce the burden of malnutrition in the country.

The way forward for FI now is to create evidence-based programs with measurable outcomes. We plan to achieve this by partnering with social sector organisations that are running targeted interventions to solve malnutrition among children & women in India. 

We plan to:

a) Build a portfolio of high-quality NGO partners who will be supported with financial aid and capacity-building tools to measure/scale up impact

b) Partner with organisations to integrate the Daily Feeding India Programme in schools across the country, especially in districts stricken with malnutrition.

A call for action and partnership 

FI is actively looking to partner with NGOs/ social impact organisations that are working to solve malnutrition in India. If you know a credible one please direct them to us.

FI is determined to build a hunger and malnutrition-free nation and tackle the roadblocks with you, along the way.

You can write to us at contact@feedingindia.org or visit the following link: https://www.feedingindia.org/requestfoodsupport.

Let’s make India hunger free and get there soon!