Sakshi Guha, 34, founder and owner of Bengali Love Café, Gurgaon, who has been nominated as a “Covid-19 Soldier” shares her story and her objectives.
As the business grew, we found pleasure in serving the isolated people, families of COVID patients, PG (paying guest) students, youth workers, corporate employees and senior citizens. Our good intentions clicked. We made enough profits to set off a bigger objective: a hunger-free future.
As per a recent update, about 194 million people in India today do not have enough food to eat, the largest number in the world. According to the Global Hunger Index 2020, India falls under the “serious” hunger category with a rank of 94 among 107 countries.
These statistics do not take into account the effects of Covid-19. The resultant migration, unemployment and loss of earning members of households have pushed millions of Indians into extreme poverty and hunger.
Mine is a Slumdog millionaire story: a girl who came out of a humble household, founded a food-tech startup amid a pandemic with zero financial support from anyone and made a fortune big enough to support many other unlettered women.
Today, Bengali Love Café, my 1-year-old venture, distributes free meals to the less privileged, gives out educational kits to poor students, holds tree plantation campaigns and trains women in business skills.
We believe that satisfying hunger is not an issue of charity. It’s a matter of justice. It is our true attempt to liberate ourselves as a community. We launched a Feed India, one-time meal, campaign under Bengali Love Cafe Foundation. We are glad to share we have been able to help more than 80,000 people across India so far.
Though, this is just the beginning. People from different cities are joining our campaign through social media channels and promoting the same.
The focus is around taking action against hunger by kindling the spirit of fulfilment through giving while reducing the wastage of food. As we all know in the food tech business, a majority of food is wasted daily either by customers or staff, but we manage to minimise it to zero wastage.
I feel immense pleasure to share that I recently won the “India 5000 Best Women Achiever” Award 2021.