Community kitchen · one lane · Shahdara
This kitchen does one thing and refuses to promise more: an evening meal — dal or a sabzi, rotis, sometimes khichdi — cooked in one Shahdara courtyard and served to whoever stands in the lane's line, no questions, no coupons, no sermons. Around a hundred and forty plates a night. The stock book prices every plate at about ₹26, and this page shows the arithmetic.
Nobody in the line is photographed, questioned or counted by name. The kitchen counts plates, not people — hunger has enough indignities without a register of the hungry.
For People who want a plate costed to the rupee · Hands for the rolling, serving and scrubbing shifts · Nearby shops with surplus atta, oil and vegetables
These four are promises this page makes on your behalf. Keep them or change them — they are not decoration.
Ways to give or join
Every figure comes off the stock book at this month's mandi and cylinder prices: a plate is about ₹26 because that is what atta, dal, oil, vegetables, gas and the cook's honest wage divide down to across a hundred and forty plates. Famous subsidised thalis cost less because someone else carries the difference; here the difference is what this page asks for.
Monthly
Twenty-six evenings times ₹26 and change — one plate in the line, every cooking night, for a month. The card most monthly givers hold for years.
One-time
The entire night — around 140 plates, the gas, the cook and helper's wages. Families give this for birthdays and remembrance days, and are welcome at the rolling table that evening.
Monthly
The kitchen's commercial cylinders — the one bill that never haggles at the mandi. Unglamorous, monthly, decisive.
Volunteer
Five to eight, any evening: rolling at the long table, serving in the line, scrubbing after. The kitchen's only hierarchy is who rolls rounder.
In kind
10 kg atta bags, oil tins, dal, and same-day vegetables from nearby shops' honest surplus. Brought to the courtyard before six, weighed, entered in the stock book.
Pick the way you want to help and it lands in the form below. Picking another replaces it — this page records one intention at a time, not a basket. NO MONEY MOVES ON THIS PAGE: nothing is charged, deducted or collected here, and how giving actually happens is written under the form.
On the ground
The line is never photographed — that rule has no exceptions and this gallery obeys it. These frames are placeholders for your own kitchen's working side: the pots, the rolling table, the chalkboard arithmetic.
How giving actually happens
Paste the trust's bank account name, number and IFSC here, and the UPI ID if you use one — exactly as the bank has them. State plainly that nobody collects cash at the serving line in the kitchen's name.
Words you have permission to print
A volunteer, a donor or a neighbouring shopkeeper, in their own words, with their name — collected with written permission. Never anyone from the line.
Your honest record
Last quarter's stock-book summary, dated: cooking evenings held, plates served by the nightly count, money in and what it bought. The audited annual figures go here exactly as the auditor wrote them.
The frames above are placeholder photographs of the kind of work this page is about — not this organisation's own record, and never a person whose face buys sympathy. The slots below are deliberately blank: this is a template, and an invented beneficiary count, an invented donor or an invented 80G number would be a lie on a page asking people to give — and inventing the tax registration is an offence. Fill each slot with something real and checkable, then delete this line.
How it works
Three steps, and money moves only to the trust's account, only against a receipt.
The form records what you picked and how to reach you. Nothing is charged here — this page cannot take money, by design.
Within the week, with the account details and receipt mechanics — or your shift evening, or the drop-off routine for the shelf.
The stock book is open at the door and the rolling table always has room. The kitchen's entire annual report is the chalk tally and the smell at seven.
Before you give
Because one stove doing one waqt well beats three promises doing them badly. The kitchen's size is set by what its courtyard, cook and stock book can honestly carry. If giving outgrows the lane, the honest expansion is a second stove in a second lane, announced before, not claimed after.
We do not screen the line, on principle. Whoever stands in it eats — the day-wage worker whose contractor vanished, the old woman whose pension is late, the boy nobody asks about. A wrongly fed person costs ₹26; a screening desk costs the line its dignity. We choose the ₹26.
The stock book counts plates by night and quarter, and that count is published as it stands. We refuse lifetime totals — a kitchen this size claiming lakhs fed is doing rhetoric, not arithmetic, and the line deserves better than rhetoric.
No, and we say it kindly: one stove means one hygiene answer when anyone asks who cooked what. Bring the raw shelf's items instead, or fund an evening and come roll rotis at your own function's memory. The kheer tradition exists for exactly this.
Only if the 80G cell at the top carries a current number, checkable on the income-tax portal. The office shares the certificate before any transfer; an empty cell means ask first.
The one thing this page asks
One form, one intention. The office replies within the week — nothing is charged or collected here.
You want to help with
Nothing yet — pick a way to give above, or say it in the form.
Three required fields: a name, a way to reply, a channel. Deliberately absent: any amount field (the cards carry the stock-book costs), any PAN (that belongs with the 80G receipt at donation time), any payment field (this page records intentions and takes nothing) — and any question about who eats here, because the kitchen does not ask, so its form certainly will not.
Your details go to the trust's office for this one reply and the shift rota if you volunteered. Never sold, no appeal calls, and the serving line stays unphotographed and unlisted forever.