Editorial: Turning tables on India’s street food culture

Chennai

Nations across the world are sitting up and taking note as the world’s biggest democracy walks a tightrope between reviving the economy and flattening the corona curve.

Come June 8, restaurants, along with shopping malls as well as places of worship across India will get the green signal to resume business as usual, with social distancing still in place. Whether we like it or not, our collective experience concerning that great Indian pastime – eating out, will change irrevocably, and in ways we are not prepared for. For a nation with an acute shortage of free to roam public spaces, restaurants, and eateries, both in built-up spaces as well as those in street corners in India, have been the go-to option for socialising – be it family get-togethers, office meetings, dates or even festive celebrations. However, as per new guidelines, restaurants have been asked to function at 50 pc of their original capacity. To put that into perspective, a family of four will now be seated across two tables, with distancing in place.

But not being able to socialise is a small facet of the real fall-out of ‘eating out’ as a concept. Street food shacks, roadside tea shops, pushcarts selling fresh, hot idlis in the morning, all stare at a bleak future. Hundreds of vendors selling everything from bhajjis to potato rolls at Marina and Bessie Beach are unsure of when the government will lift restrictions and allow them to function. Smaller restaurants that once sold Chinese fast food and quick meals were almost entirely dependent on migrant labour who served as cooks. Thousands of such semi-skilled migrant workers, who essentially functioned as the engine room of India’s restaurant business, both on the kitchen and the logistics front – are now on their way back home, leaving the owners of such institutions scrambling for replacements. A conservative estimate by hotelier associations indicates that not more than 30 per cent of such eateries will be able to reopen.

There are as many as 20 lakh street food vendors in the country. Even as the lockdown is being gradually eased, the future of such vendors hangs in the balance. While most hotels are seeing their take-away orders far exceed their in-house orders, digital development has evaded most street food vendors for long. One of the options to keep such vendors in the business, at least until large gatherings begin returning, is by onboarding them onto popular food aggregator platforms.

There is also the Project Clean Street Food initiative undertaken by FSSAI in collaboration with Skill India, which aims to train such vendors on aspects of safe food and hygiene, to help improve the quality of their offerings. More recently, the Centre launched a special micro-credit scheme to offer an affordable loan of up to Rs 10,000 to street vendors. As many as 50 lakh street vendors from rural and urban pockets of India could be benefitted by the Pradhan Mantri Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi. In the backdrop of COVID-19, this section of the unorganised hospitality business will need even greater handholding from the government, and the private sector as well. Because right now, all these vendors who provided us with affordable meals, don’t even have enough to keep their home fires burning.