Restaurants and Good Samaritans step up to feed Covid-19 patients across Bengaluru

From restaurants to home cooks, Bengaluru residents are finding innovative ways to supply food to Covid-19 patients

With the highest number of active cases in India, Bengaluru city is facing severe disruption to the way its residents and businesses go about their day-to-day lives. Still, out of the gloom, many selfless restaurants and Good Samaritans are doing their part to feed the afflicted and needy.

With policymakers caught in the race for vaccines and containment, restaurants and citizens have taken it on themselves to provide food and deliver it all over the city through a bootstrapped network of cooks, delivery partners and social media.

One Banaswadi-based restaurant called Desi Masala is shipping almost 10,000 packets of food a day, according to managing director Sandeep Jain. The restaurant has been converted into a cloud kitchen with a 24-person team, supplying food not only to Covid-19 patients but also doctors, nurses and other frontline workers at Victoria Hospital and Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital.

“We think that there are a lot of gaps that we can fill,” said Sandeep, adding that it was high time to give back to society.

Noel John quit his day job at Intel to found the self-funded Gift of Help Foundation which provides food to almost 400 families in and around Bengaluru, with a particular emphasis on the nutritional value of the food. Noel is passionate about cooking and has no qualms about cooking for 200 to 300 people at a go.

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While restaurants and NGOs are doing their part to help residents tide over the crisis, the sheer volume of patients has brought in a number of home cooks and conscious citizens who have taken it upon themselves to pitch in and send out daily meals free of charge.

Rheea Mukherjea, an author and entrepreneur, runs a kitchen that has served eight families in the last couple of weeks. She makes use of social media to raise funds to support a project which aims to distribute ration kits all over the city.

The woman who inspired Rheea to aid ailing Covid-19 patients, Sneha, put up a post on Instagram offering home-cooked meals to people in the city when the pandemic was picking up steam. Sneha didn’t stop there. She pooled her resources and reached out to friends and volunteers to build a network to cook and deliver meals across the city with help from Swiggy and Dunzo.

Being a former product manager at MakeMyTrip, Sneha went the extra yard and attempted to solve the problem of disjointed, scattered information about meals for Covid-19 patients by building a website called covidmeals.in, which boasts more than 260 home chefs and has streamlined the process of looking up people willing to send out free home-cooked meals.

“The people who can afford to always want to pay me, but I tell them not to pay me for the meal and delivery and instead pay it forward and sponsor meals,” said Sneha, who is a mother to a four-year-old boy. “People have been very generous, someone who has got five meals has paid for 50, others have paid for a hundred meals.”