For a better part of the Coronavirus pandemic, the remote villages in the Upper Tons Valley of Uttarakhand were untouched.  While the rest of India was battling the first wave of the infection, here, the locals who rely heavily on tourism and selling agricultural produce, saw their livelihood hit. Not the infection, the valley which is home to 21,000-odd people across 37 villages, was grappling with an economic crisis.

Filmmaker and food researcher Shubhra Chatterji, who divides her time between Mumbai and Uttarakhand, set up a social entrepreneurship business with her husband Anand Sankar in October 2020. The Tons Valley Shop was their attempt to rectify the supply chain disrupted by the national lockdown. They turned to Instagram and WhatsApp to connect the producers directly with urban consumers. “I don’t think we had any cases until September [2020],” Chatterji recalls. It was only when the lockdown was relaxed later in the year, that a few stray cases were reported. In April 2021, things took a drastic turn. “We hadn’t seen this coming.”