Dream’ project to feed slum residents bags coveted award
Mumbai: It all started with a dream that MBA student Ankit Jain had around a year ago in which he saw himself serving food to the poor at a slum near his college Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) at Juhu.
He and three of his classmates then embarked on a mission to provide nutritious meals to slum-dwellers at Rs 5 in ready-to-eat packets. Last week, their project ‘Ahaar: Meal for Poor at Ten Cents’ won the coveted first prize at the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, defeating teams from universities across the world, including the Kellogs Business School, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine, University of Alberta, Singapore Management University, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA; University of Buckingham (UK); University of British Columbia; University of Washington, Seattle, USA, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and others.
Jain and his classmates Sidharth Bedi, Sreejith NG and Rahul Agarwal, who won $10,000 now want the project to be implemented in other parts of India. They are already in talks with a Mumbai-based NGO, Garbage Concern, for a pilot project in Juhu slums.
“The preparations began a year ago after I had the dream. After discussing it with my classmates, I realised we could use our management expertise to solve malnourishment problem in slum areas,” said Jain.
The students visited slums in Juhu and Dharavi and interacted with residents to find their nutritional needs. They observed that they were mostly daily wage earners unable to meet the daily requirement of 700 calories because they could not afford to buy nutritious food.
With the help of their college nutritionist, they were able to chart out a daily menu consisting of rice, lentils, vegetable, vegetable peels and jaggery and also worked on subsiding costs and maintaining quality.
“As part of our project, we also aim to empower women in slum areas by hiring them to make the food packets in lieu of wages and free food packets for their families. Depending on feasibility of the pilot project, we plan to approach venture capitalists to implement the scheme on a bigger scale,” said Bedi.
The GSEC invites students from around the world and across fields of study ‘to find creative, unorthodox solutions to problems of poverty in the developing world.’
At the competition, the students had to create an innovative product, and develop a new business model to market it and get it validated from management experts.
“The projects of other teams were very good. What surprised us was that along with teams from developing countries, those from countries like the US and UK too, were eager to lend a helping hand to the marginalised people in the developing counties through their ideas,” said Jain.