Slum dwellers to get nutritious food at Rs 5

A dream of distributing food packets among slum dwellers resulted in five students of city-college coming up with a business plan that aims to fulfill the project. According to the plan, nutritious food will be distributed to slum dwellers at a nominal cost of Rs 5.

The five management students of the NMIMS college in north west Mumbai recently won the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC), held at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, for their business plan 'Ahaar' to provide meals to slum dwellers.

As per the plan, nutritious meals would be provided in the form of aluminium foil food packets that contained rice, lentils, jaggery and vegetables at a cost of Rs 5.

"The idea for the business plan came about a year ago from a dream one of the team members, Ankit Jain, had in which he was distributing packets of food to children living in slums," NG Sreejith, one of the team members, said.

After discussing it with fellow team members, the five students decided to come up with a business plan to provide cheap nutritious meals to people living in slums, he said. To understand the food habits of slum dwellers the students visited slums in Dharavi and Juhu to study how people lived there.