Smart food security solution in urban India: An integrative innovation

BANGALORE, INDIA: Henry Ford has said "I invented nothing new, I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work." This is what we call integrative innovation as opposed to radical innovation.

India needs to reimagine solving its societal problems integrating several practices and solutions using recent inventions particularly in ICT and training the stake holders to earn their livelihood providing services to their kin. This can be applied to problems which involve large populations such as public health, food security, skill training and several others.

Here we concentrate on food security solution for the urban poor in India. We have to put all the desperate efforts of hawkers, NGOs and the Government to provide food to millions of poor people and organize ourselves as a well-designed and well-articulated smart food security supply chain and business network which delivers quality nutritious food to millions below poverty line and in the process also generate millions of jobs.

Current efforts by Hawkers, Government and NGOs: One third of India's population lives in urban areas out of which one fourth of them i.e. 100 Million are below poverty line. Lack of food security has spiralling effect on malnutrition, infectious diseases and lack of education and development for generations.

The Government of India has launched several initiatives towards ensuring food security including the public distribution scheme, mid day meal program for school children, a scheme for pregnant and lactating mothers, integrated child development services, and the national rural employment scheme (NREGAS).

Recently the government has introduced the cash subsidy scheme and also the food security scheme in some parts of the country. Separate organizations such as the food corporation of India, warehousing corporation, whole sale shops, and ration shops were created with huge budgetary allocations.

The performance of these schemes has been far below the mandates. The Government schemes provide grain security rather than food security.

The mid-day meal scheme was initiated with the objectives addressing the classroom hunger, and to increase school enrolment and address malnutrition among children.

Voluntary organizations such as Akshaya Patra are therefore encouraged to set up operations wherever possible. Naandi Foundation in partnership with state governments and through corporate donations run several automated Midday Meal Kitchens across the country. Both Akshaya Patra and Naandi maintain kitchens that cook and distribute for millions of people every day.

The lower income groups in the country spend a higher proportion of their income by purchasing food from hawkers mainly because they are accessible and affordable. Some families cook at home or on the road side.

Smart food security means providing nutritious food to urban poor through a process that is enabled, coordinated and executed by combination of information and communication technologies and their applications such as cloud computing, sensor networks, GPS, UID and several others.

Our aim here is to propose a system of systems architecture that makes nutritious food available and accessible at affordable prices to the urban poor and that replaces the current schemes which have become examples of corruption, diversion, adulteration etc.

The Smart Food security network: Our smart business network consists of distribution centres (owned by the big brand retailers), kitchens (owned by private players) supplying food packets bar-coded or tagged with RFID, hawkers and small food outlets with IT enabled and GPS equipped push carts equipped with solar or gas run refrigerators and ovens, state government and city corporation, industry organizations, call centres to track the hawkers, the food packets, the consumption patterns and above all nutritionists to help with the menu and food preparation.

The below poverty line card holders can get a discount by showing their UID card and this can be validated through the cloud. The Hawker can be reimbursed the discounts next day by the kitchen owners who would collect the same from the Government.

The location and capacity of the kitchens, the push carts and other retailing outlets can be determined using standard optimization techniques from the demand estimates. Depending on the demand, the kitchens can prepare the food and supply to the hawker via a milk run trucks. The menu can be crowd sourced via messages from the cell phones from the customers. The computer server in the city cloud can keep track of the food packets issued for settlement later.

NREGAS can be used for training chefs, cooks, hawker owners, PDS employees, school employees etc. The hawkers and small hotel owners can be funded by microfinance organizations. Standardized food outlets with fixed menu can be opened at various places in the city and take home facility can be provided nearer to the kitchens.

Coordinated food security supply chains are durable arrangements between government, distributors, hawkers, and consumers about what and how much to produce, time of delivery, quality and safety conditions, and price.

Quality management systems (QMSs) provide the standards and monitoring mechanisms for achieving, maintaining, or improving the desired quality level across the supply chain and to end consumers. The streamlined, standardized and automated or semi-automated using IT and sensor networks business processes replace the currently fragmented inefficient ones.

The network consists of half million stake holders in big cities. Majority of them are hawkers The asset intensive part of the chain is the kitchens and the distribution centres. The governance model can be an orchestrator type i.e. the governance is managed by a third party such as an NGO and one of the lead players such as the kitchen owners can manage the supply chain.

Is there a need for Proof of concept or a Pilot Project? We do not think so. Our concept is already implemented in parts very successfully by NGOs, Naandi, and AkshayaPatra for the mid-day meal program and by more than one million hawkers catering food to millions of people in various cities.

What it needs for implementation: Government support, orchestrator with connections with social groups, governments, small restaurant and kirana shops, kitchen owners and hawkers and a well designed governance mechanism.

The author is fellow IEEE, INSA Scientist, Computer Science and Automation at Indian Institute of Science