Delhi Government's Atal Canteens is a terrible idea, here's why

Delhi Government's Atal Canteens is a terrible idea. Running kitchens selling ₹5 meals to the poor isn't, and shouldn't be the government's job.

Firstly, this is not a statement on the intent of the above move. Providing a good meal to the poor for free (or ₹5) is a nobel endeavour, obviously. The thought "nobody should sleep hungry" is of course beautiful and pretty non controversial. Why would anyone want anybody to sleep hungry?

That said, what's also true is that if the government takes this up as a welfare project, it's almost certain that it's going to screw everything up. If you count the second order effects, this will turn out as a huge travesty, rife with terrible problems of all kinds (many of which didn't even exist before this idea came up).

To begin with, the government has no business running a cloud kitchen. Even if it's subsidized, this is basically an extremely operations heavy enterprise with a complicated "service" angle to it. There's so much scope of corruption in this project, that one can easily visualise serious health hazards propping up due to greedy Babus stealing raw material meant for the poor, and replacing them with extremely bad quality stuff.

Cloud kitchens seem simple, but are actually deeply complicated. This is the reason why all big aggregators like Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto, Ola, etc. tried running cloud kitchens on their own. But failed spectacularly, and without exception. A kitchen is an ops heavy, hot mess. Give it in the hands of a Babu, and it's bound to deliver poison, quite literally. Government's own experience of providing mid-day meals in schools (though a pretty different game) has shown the extent to which Babus go to steal. Atal Canteen sounds like that perfect opportunity: Beautifully designed so they can steal some more, with little to no accountability.

Secondly, Delhi has a great number of street food sellers who serve quite inexpensive, but filling meals. These are extremely hard working and respectable small businesses that are dutifully serving the same clientele Atal Canteen wishes to serve. The good thing about these folks is that they're market driven, and thus self correcting when it comes to pricing and quality of their service. When 100 Atal Canteens prop up across Delhi serving about 1 Lakh people daily, what happens to these guys? They'll get screwed for no reason!

And with that, what we'll be seeing is good, motivated, hard working people driven out of work. All because a government came up with a bad idea.

And lastly, people sleeping hungry in Delhi is not a disease, but actually symptom of a larger malaise. Institutionalising free canteens at government's scale does nothing to solve for the actual problem which is making people sleep hungry; like unchecked migration, shortfall of jobs, exploitation by beggar mafia due to institutional corruption, etc. All it's doing is putting a band-aid, all while destroying the incentive to do good work. Does that help?

No, it doesn't. In fact, it just makes things worse.

Atal Canteens are starting out in Delhi to much fanfare.

P.S. You just read an honest (and hopefully valuable) article for free. If you like reading my writings, consider making donations. Amounts don't matter, gestures do. Here's a big cheers to all my Patrons!

Read more articles here.