Indian weddings (and other big parties) serve a lot of food — and have a lot of leftovers. Now there’s a plan in Mumbai to share the surplus with those who are hungry.
Mahesh Kumar A./AP

Living in India provides daily examples of life’s major contradictions: silence and chaos, simplicity and grandeur, lack and excess… Traditional Indian weddings illustrate the examples of abundance – even the most modest of weddings will represent some version of the the proverbial “groaning board” – be it traditional banana-leaf thali of south India or an elaborate multi-course dinner in towering tents. Whenever food is prepared for a crowd there’s potential for waste, even in the so-called “developed world”.

The beauty of this inspiring story is how it taps into Mumbai’s dabbawalla system, taking advantage of the extraordinary logistics of a food distribution system that has functioned well for decades. (If you’ve never seen Ritesh Batra’s beautiful film The Lunchbox, run and find it now…)

India has 194.6 million undernourished people — that’s more than half the world total.It’s what people mean when they talk about “food insecurity:” the economic and social condition of limited or unpredictable access to adequate food.

But in a study published in the August 2015 issue of the journal Lancet, researchers found that India also has 46 million obese citizens.

The dabbawallas — Mumbai’s lunch delivery collective — have stepped in with an initiative they’re calling the Roti Bank. Their aim is to connect the have-nots with the have-too-muchs.

“We deal with food every day, so we’re ideally placed to fix this,” says Dashrath Kedare, a co-founder of the Roti Bank and a leader of one of the dabbawalla unions.

Across India, there are a few soup-kitchen equivalents, mostly religious charities that dole out food at gurudwaras — Sikh temples — mosques and churches. And there are midday meal schemes to ensure kids in some schools get lunch.

But there’s no way to deal with leftover cooked food.

“An average wedding has 500 guests,” says Rushikesh Kadam, an event planner in Mumbai. “The smallest one I’ve done had 100 guests, the largest had 2,500.”

Typically, he says, a quarter of the food that’s prepared is trashed. Sometimes, beggars will hang around the back of an event location, near the kitchen, when parties wind up in the wee hours of the morning. The caterers then dispose of leftovers at their own discretion. But, generally, it’s for scavengers — and then the trash dumps.

“Thousands of tons of food is wasted every day,” Kadam adds. “And it needs to be distributed and consumed within an hour or it will spoil.”

Enter the dabbawallas, translated as “the ones with [tiffin] boxes.” Every day 200,000 office workers in Mumbai receive lunch sent from their own homes through the network of 4,000 dabbawallas who crisscross the city with pushcarts and lunch boxes, called “tiffins,” by road, train, bicycle and on foot to ensure the right dabba reaches the right person at the right time. They’re so efficient, there’s even a Harvard Business School case study about them.

At one of Kadam’s events, a group of dabbawallas was helping with serving and catering as a bit of side business. Subhash Talekar, a leader of the dabbawallas’ union, had seen food wasted before — but something clicked this time. Kedare and Talekar packed up the food and took it to the closest train station, where they distributed it to the homeless and hungry.

“We travel these routes every day. We know exactly where the poor people gather,” Talekar says.

Read the entire article here.