The Plate That Never Reached Anyone: What a Train Journey Taught Us About Food Security
It's 11 pm on a long-distance train somewhere between two cities you've forgotten the names of. The pantry attendant is doing his final round, and there they are - trays of rice, dal, and rotis nobody ordered, sitting untouched under the tube light. In a few minutes, they'll be scraped into a bin at the next station. Multiply that tray by thousands of trains across India every single day, and the picture gets uncomfortable: a country running one of the largest railway catering operations on Earth, quietly throwing away food, while millions a few hundred metres from that same platform go to bed hungry. That image - wasted trays a few feet from empty stomachs - is the paradox of food security in one frame. And it's the question doing the rounds on social media lately: why doesn't Indian Railways just donate its leftover food instead of discarding it? It sounds like a simple fix. It isn't. Walking through why not tells us almost everything we need to know about f...