What ₹6,000 actually buys
Most appeals ask for a number without saying where it came from. Here is ours, worked out line by line, including the parts nobody usually counts.
When an organisation asks you for ₹6,000, you are entitled to know how it arrived at that figure. Most of us do not tell you. The number is round, it sounds reasonable, and the working is not shown.
Here is ours.
One complete meal, for everyone here
₹6,000 puts lunch or dinner in front of every person at our Ameenpur home. That is rice, a curry, sambar and raita — a full plate, not a token one. With a non-vegetarian curry it is ₹7,500.
Breakfast is lighter, and costs ₹2,120.
A full day of eating — breakfast, lunch and dinner for everyone — comes to ₹14,120.
The part that usually goes unmentioned
Those figures are not the price of ingredients. They include the cooking gas, the vegetables, and the wages of the person who cooks.
We mention it because the distinction matters and is usually hidden. Our grocery bill — rice, dal, oil, the staples — is about ₹2,69,303 a month. Feeding everyone altogether is about ₹4,23,600 a month. The gap between those two numbers, roughly ₹1.54 lakh, is everything that turns groceries into a meal.
Plenty of appeals quote the first number because it is smaller and sounds more efficient. But nobody eats rice that has not been cooked, and the person cooking it has a family too.
Who eats
Seventy elderly residents at Ameenpur, most of whom were left behind by their families, and seventy more at our Vikarabad home. Around a hundred children who come to our upper primary school and eat breakfast and lunch during school hours. Around fifty more in the evening who cannot count on a meal at home.
Why we publish this
Two reasons.
The first is that you should be able to check us. A figure with its working shown can be argued with. A round number cannot, which is precisely why round numbers are so popular.
The second is that these costs do not pause. The food bill arrives every month whether or not anyone is thinking about us, which is why a standing monthly gift is worth so much more to us than the same amount given once. A hundred and forty-one people giving ₹3,000 a month would cover every meal we serve, permanently.
We are nowhere near that. But it is a number, and now you know where it came from.
Everything above is paid for by donors
No government scheme reaches most of the people we care for. If this was worth reading, it was worth funding.
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