Every morning, before most of Delhi has opened its eyes, a kitchen in Connaught Place is already running at full speed. Thousands of meal boxes — roti, kadhi chawal, rajma, vegetable noodles — are packed and loaded into a van before 9 a.m. By the time the city’s traffic begins to snarl, Atul Kapur’s team is already on the road.
Kapur is not a celebrity chef. He is a Delhi restaurateur, co-owner of the Q’BA restaurant in Connaught Place, who looked at the hunger around him and decided his kitchen could do more. In 2016, he co-founded Rasoi on Wheels — a mobile kitchen that now distributes thousands of freshly cooked meals every week to homeless individuals, slum schools and daily wage workers across Delhi-NCR. The meals are not leftovers.
A City Sitting on Top of a Hunger Crisis
Delhi’s contradictions are visible from any street corner. Gleaming malls stand minutes from settlements where families cannot guarantee a single meal a day. India ranks 102 out of 123 countries on the 2024 Global Hunger Index, with a hunger level classified as “serious.”
Nationally, an estimated 811 million people remain undernourished — the largest such population in the world. In Delhi’s urban slums specifically, a Tata-Cornell Institute study found that 51% of households experienced food insecurity. India produces enough food to feed itself. The crisis is not one of supply — it is one of access, distribution and dignity.
Ghar Jaisa Khana: Food Like Home
Rasoi on Wheels started by serving 30 meals a day. That grew to 300, then to 800 to 1,000 meals five days a week, plus Sunday langars for the homeless.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, with Delhi’s migrant workers stranded, the organization distributed close to 20,000 meals a day.
The operation’s tagline is ghar jaisa khana — food like home. It is a deliberate choice. The people served are not handed scraps. They receive a rotating daily menu, individually packaged and prepared fresh from 3 a.m. every morning. Kapur calls the funding model ISR — Individual Social Responsibility — donations from ordinary people marking birthdays, weddings and funerals by feeding strangers instead.
Kapur has said that food is the most important requirement and that people should not be deprived of healthy food simply because they cannot afford it.
A Global Movement, One Kitchen at a Time
Kapur’s model sits within a broader shift in how food professionals are responding to hunger. Globally, José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen has served hundreds of millions of meals across crisis zones, built on the same core principle: that trained cooks, given the right support, can respond to hunger faster and more humanely than most institutions. In 2024 alone, World Central Kitchen served more than 109 million meals across 20 countries.
Both operations reject the model of surplus redistribution — the cold, leftover approach to aid — in favor of treating hungry people as people who deserve a proper meal.
What Policy Can Learn From a Van
Rasoi on Wheels is not a comprehensive solution to Delhi’s hunger crisis. But it points to something that policy consistently underestimates — the capacity of local, sustained, community-rooted action to fill gaps that government programs leave open.
India’s Public Distribution System, designed to provide subsidized food grains to the poor, reaches millions. But it does not reach the homeless man sleeping under a bridge in Connaught Place, or the construction worker’s child who arrives at school too hungry to learn. Rasoi on Wheels does.
Looking Ahead
Urban food poverty in India remains a structural challenge that no single organization can solve. The work of Rasoi on Wheels demonstrates that locally rooted, dignity-centered food initiatives can reach populations that formal systems miss. As India continues to grapple with the gap between food production and food access, models like this offer practical evidence that sustained, community-driven action can complement broader policy efforts to reduce hunger and poverty.
– Parthive Mukherji
Parthive is based in Edinburgh, UK and focuses on Celebs and World News for The Borgen Project.
Photo: Flickr
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