Nine children behind a construction site
That is where this started. Not with a strategy, a donor pitch or a registration certificate — those all came later, and reluctantly.
A few of us had been driving past the same site every evening for months. Children playing in the rubble while their parents finished a shift. One evening somebody said out loud what all of us had been thinking, and the following Sunday we cooked one large pot of khichdi and took it there on a scooter.
Nine children ate. We had no plan for the tenth. So we came back the next week with a bigger pot, and word travelled the way it does — a neighbour told a friend, a teacher told a parent — and within three months we were serving a hundred and twenty people on a fixed evening route.
Registration happened because donors needed receipts and schools needed a name on a letter. The 80G approval happened because our supporters deserved the deduction they were entitled to. None of it changed what we actually do on a Sunday.
Today we run four standing programmes and four seasonal drives. The food is still cooked and carried by volunteers who show up on their day off, and every trustee still does field duty.
Sneha Patel