The city's homeless may finally be able to have a dignified way to fill their bellies. They may no longer have to scavenge for throwaways or digging dumpsters.A project focusing on managing wasted fresh food will soon hand out proper meals and set up open fridges for the homeless. All this, without a single rupee spent on preparing these meals.
The `No Food Waste' project, a crusade against food-waste that can stave off hunger for several of the state's homeless inhabitants, will be working with Greater Chennai Corporation to accomplish this. The group will get untouched leftover food from collection points across cities and distribute it to the homeless, with an eye on localities that have quite a few of them. A G Padmanaban, the 23-year-old founder of the project, has sought the corporation's support for his endeavour.
Parallelly, the project will also set up two refrigerators at restaurants bakeries in its initial run to enable a "public take away" system for the homeless. "To accomplish this, we are currently mapping the city for `hunger spots', areas with several clusters of homeless population," said Padmanaban, who is looking for not just food donations, but also vehicles and volunteers.The crowd-funded initiative, he said, was also looking to take in donations from corporates and office buildings that account for a large amount of waste. Several IT companies like ZohoCorp, he revealed, were keen on the tie-up.
The project which was set to take off in 2016 had met with logistics issues "We have developed this model suited to the city's neighbouring this time, said Padmanaban.
Channelling tonnes of untouched leftover food to the needy, the project currently feeds people across Coimbatore, Erode, Salem, Trichy in the state and in the National Capital Region (NCR).
The `No Food Waste' project, a crusade against food-waste that can stave off hunger for several of the state's homeless inhabitants, will be working with Greater Chennai Corporation to accomplish this. The group will get untouched leftover food from collection points across cities and distribute it to the homeless, with an eye on localities that have quite a few of them. A G Padmanaban, the 23-year-old founder of the project, has sought the corporation's support for his endeavour.
Parallelly, the project will also set up two refrigerators at restaurants bakeries in its initial run to enable a "public take away" system for the homeless. "To accomplish this, we are currently mapping the city for `hunger spots', areas with several clusters of homeless population," said Padmanaban, who is looking for not just food donations, but also vehicles and volunteers.The crowd-funded initiative, he said, was also looking to take in donations from corporates and office buildings that account for a large amount of waste. Several IT companies like ZohoCorp, he revealed, were keen on the tie-up.
The project which was set to take off in 2016 had met with logistics issues "We have developed this model suited to the city's neighbouring this time, said Padmanaban.
Channelling tonnes of untouched leftover food to the needy, the project currently feeds people across Coimbatore, Erode, Salem, Trichy in the state and in the National Capital Region (NCR).