Waste food is a serious problem in India where the United Nations has said that about 40% of the food in India is wasted and never reaches the needy there a man, Chandra Sekhar Kundu – the founder of FEED (Food Education and Economic Development Society) NGO has started the project of distributing excess food, which is otherwise wasted, to the needy ones. As Debleena Dutt Mukherjee and Tathagata Mukherjee join the project and their first start off was at Gariahat today where many street children were fed. The batch of professors who have taken the initiative ahead is Chandra Sekhar Kundu, Abhijit Debnath, Dr, Apurba Chatterjee, Amitabha Chakraborty, and Sujoy Das Mahapatra.
As Tathagata Mukherjee speaks to Woman Times, “This is a batch of professors who have been doing this project in Asansol, Durgapur and other areas and now we are getting associated with them to expand the project to the interiors as well. There are people in the interiors who survive on the eggs of the ants such deplorable is their condition. They have also self-funded a school in Asansol where there is a library for the poor students. There are so many deprived children who do not get proper food. They have also started food supply for poor children under the age of 14 even at night.”
On the same note, Debleena Dutt Mukherjee says, “These children are far better than what we are targeting. The statistics speak of the possibility where if excess food is distributed there will be a balance of food distribution. There are even people for whom rice is delicacy hence we have thought of the most popular and primitive way of collecting food from people and that is ‘Mushti Bhikka’. We want media to come up and spread the word so that more and more people come forward.”
When we asked Chandra Sekhar Kundu about his journey he said, “I encountered a strange incident in my life on my son’s birthday when under compulsion I had to throw a lot of food to the waste bin, on the contrary, a pair of children were searching for chicken in the dustbin for their meal. It moved me and that compelled me to take an initiative like this. And I am really glad that celebrities like Debleena and Tathagata are with us as most celebrities are not such humble to contact on their own and help in devising the future plan for this initiative.”
