The Rs 5 meal

The centre resembles a hostel mess, with spartan benches attached to a table for customers, and with its white tiles and granite slab counters where food is served.

A day in the life of Aahar centre, Bhubaneswar

It’s 10.30 am and business as usual outside the Bhubaneswar railway station — scores of people haggling with auto and taxiwallahs, others scrambling to get inside buses at the nearby bus stand. Less than 100 metres away and in one corner of the bus stand, an unremarkable white building is slowly coming into action. A small van arrives at its doorstep with two large jars of mango pickle, 20 quintals each of cooked rice and dalma — a preparation of lentil/chana and vegetables — and a 1,000 steel plates. The staff pours the steaming hot food into steel utensils.

At 11 am, the building is opened to the public. It’s one of the 20 Aahar centres the government of Orissa launched on April 1 across five cities — Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Berhampur, Rourkela and Sambalpur . Here, anyone can walk in and enjoy a full meal for Rs 5 only. The centres, strategically located near bus stands, railway stations and district collectorates, are open from 11 am to 3 pm on all days except Sunday, and serve only lunch.

Niasi Nayak, a middle-aged widow who has arrived by passenger train from Jatni, 25 km from Bhubaneswar, is one of the first walk-ins. After paying Rs 5 in exchange for a plastic token at the counter, she queues up to pick up a steel plate and get her share of dalma, rice and pickle, duly served by staffers dressed in a green uniform, green aprons and green caps.

Only grouse so far: why only one helping allowed of the clean, tasty food?

Green is the colour of the ruling BJD , and the tokens are green here as well and so are the posters on the wall. That’s where the subtlety ends. The posters have images of a beaming Naveen Patnaik, the Chief Minister, and advertise popular state schemes such as Madhubabu Pension Yojana, Mamata Yojana and Harischandra Yojana.

Nayak, though, can’t be bothered with that. “Nowhere can I get all this for Rs 5,” she says, tucking into her food. Nayak has been travelling to Bhubaneswar for the last 18 years to collect her pension after her gardener husband passed away.

Sitting next to her is Tapaswini Das, who’s come from Boudh, 250 km away, with her large family of sons and cousins. They are taking a halt at Bhubaneswar before catching a train to Cuttack, where Das is being treated for cancer at a government hospital. “At a dhaba, we would have spent Rs 50 on a plate,” says Das’s cousin Chudamani, as he relishes a spoonful of mango pickle.

That amount of pickle at a dhaba outside the Aahar outlet, for example, alone costs Rs 5.

The centre resembles a hostel mess, with spartan benches attached to a table for customers, and with its white tiles and granite slab counters where food is served. There are two water dispensers and a dishwasher to clean used plates. Four CCTV cameras keep a watch.

Modelled on Madhya Pradesh’s Ram Roti scheme, each of Orissa’s Aahar centres can serve 1,000 people. The average daily footfall at the centre near the railway station is 980. Ajay Kumar Nanda, who sits at the counter, says sometimes over a thousand people turn up. “We stop serving when we reach the 1,000 mark or at 3 pm,” he says.
The food is prepared in a centralised kitchen run by the NGO Akshay Patra Foundation at Phulanakhara, on the Bhubaneswar-Cuttack highway. The kitchen supplies the food to four centres each in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack — the cities are 23 km apart. “Everything is mechanised in the kitchen with little human intervention. For each meal, we use 200 grams of rice and 50 grams of dal,” says Madhusudan Mohapatra of Akshay Patra. The meals, once prepared, must be delivered to the centres by 10.30 am.

By 12.30 pm, the queue at the centre spills over to outside the building. Siddharth, a young software engineer, has come to see “how the government is using our taxes”. K K Rao, a hotel manager, finds the food “tasty” but wonders “if the government can maintain the quality”. Bijay Swain, a 44-year-old HIV patient who has come from Ganjam, 140 km away, for both treatment and in search of work as a construction labourer, eats the Aahar lunch only because “I am hungry”. “A dinner costs me Rs 40 while breakfast costs Rs 20. If I can save on my lunch, I will save something,” he says. Nandan Singh, a 10-year-old ragpicker, devours the lunch. “Badhiya laguchhi (delicious),” he says.

Alok Nayak, who serves food at the centre for a salary of Rs 4,000 a month, complains that “every day, someone or the other wants a second helping”. “When I refuse them saying only one helping is allowed, they get angry and shout. Some even come drunk and look to pick a fight,” he says. Nayak also feels unhappy when some people throw away half of what they get into dustbins.

There is also political bickering over the scheme, which would cost Rs 2.2 crore per year per outlet. Just before it was launched, central PSUs such as Nalco, Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd and Rourkela Steel Plant of SAIL pulled out of their commitment to donate Rs 3 crore each every year to the centres. The state government then roped in its own PSUs to bankroll the scheme. The Aahar centres in Bhubaneswar are funded by Orissa Mining Corporation.

Suresh Sahoo, a security guard eating at the centre, is, meanwhile, wishing for something more. “My family stays back in my village, Athgarh, 130 km away… I would love to come here everyday for lunch as I save money. I am also willing to pay Rs 10 if the government can provide one more dish,” he says.

Source:: Indian Express