Mobile Vegetable Garden Kit – Monitoring & Evaluation Report for Shelters & ICDS (2021)

The Covid-19 pandemic, exposed vulnerabilities of lower income communities and marginalized groups with respect to access to fresh and nutritious food. Disruptions in livelihoods and schools led to in-access to fresh food for children from vulnerable communities, who were dependent on the mid-day meal programme for their daily source of nutrition. It also resulted in reduced opportunity to improve health and well-being which is critical to fighting the virus. Therefore, CRC decided to partner with TN-ICDS, Greater Chennai Corporation’s Shelter for Urban Homeless Initiative and the Information and Resource Centre for the Deprived Urban Communities (IRCDUC) to target vulnerable communities accessing Anganwadis and homeless shelters with the aim of improving access to nutritious food and general health and well-being of vulnerable communities.

Organic Mobile Vegetable Garden Kits were distributed in three batches (March, April and August 2021) to 151 ICDS centres. All the centres initially received 5 kits and some well-performing centres were provided with additional kits later. In Jann 2022, 75 newly identified ICDS centres will receive 5 kits each. Similarly, 55 homeless shelters were initially provided with 5 kits each beteen April 2021 and August 2021 following which some well performing shelters received additional kits. The kits were arranged through Sempulam Sustainable Solutions and the contents of each kit included:

• three grow bags for greens, two grow bags for vegetables;
• 40kg of pot mixture;
• 10 kg of vermicompost;
• 50g neem oil – soap mix;
• five varieties of ‘keerai’ or greens seeds and six varieties of vegetable seeds such as ‘Arakeerai,
Sirukeerai, Paruppukeerai, Palak keerai, multi-keerai, Tomato, Okra, Cowpea, Cluster Beans,
Avarai and Radish.