Hemant, a part-time hawker, lives behind a roadside temple off Janpath in the heart of the capital. The 18-year-old has a new love — the Aap ki Rasoi

(kitchen) van that makes a stop at India Gate lawns every noon and gives him his one hot meal of the day.
“I am alive today only because of this food,” Hemant, a migrant from Chhattisgarh, told IANS.
He posts himself at the India Gate lawns promptly at noon, with a beaten vessel in his hand to collect hot food for himself and two others who stay

with him. The truck is one of a dozen vehicles in the capital from which hot food is served to hundreds every day.
‘Aap Ki Rasoi — Toward making Delhi a hunger-free state’ is an initiative of the Delhi government. The pet project of Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit,

it was launched in April this year under the Bhagidari (partnership) program.
The government has roped in corporates to fund the production and distribution of the food.
There is a huddle of small beggar children at the end of the queue. Once served their hot dal (lentils), vegetables and rice, they squat just a few

metres away and appear to be having a picnic under the mellow winter sun.
The van driver said, “The kids sometimes become naughty. They try to take more food. But we can’t give it to them. We have too many mouths to feed.”
The queue keeps getting longer. An hour after noon, there are hundreds waiting; beggars, disabled people, women, children...
By 1.30 p.m., the activity winds up and the truck leaves.
How is the quality of the food? “It is quite tasty, we get a lot of variety,” says a disabled man who runs a mobile phone booth on the India Gate

lawns. “Mostly we have variations of rice with sambar, rajma, or kadhi but some days we get roti (Indian bread).”
The soup kitchens are also run at 10 other centres around the capital.
“We are living in the national capital territory of the largest democracy. Despite this there are people who eat from garbage bins. We wanted to

bring about a change, to provide at least one hot nutritious meal to the hundreds of people,” Kulanand Joshi, joint secretary of Bhagidari in the

chief minister’s office, told IANS.
“We found it difficult to tackle the problem alone — so it was the chief minister’s idea to rope in corporates,” he added.
The cost of a single meal works out to $0.15 to $0.20, including transport cost. Each centre feeds at least 500 people a day. Often the centre at

Chandni Chowk ends up feeding 1,200 people. The numbers have risen in the winter. In all, around 5,000 people are being fed a hot nutritious meal every day.