Madras Week: A government canteen that strives to meet green goals

A visit to the 62-year-old IT department canteen at Aayakar Bhawan in Chennai, which is trying hard to meet the sustainability goals

As a chip off the cooperative movement, the IT department canteen would have had a slightly informal style of functioning when it was established at Aayakar Bhawan in 1961. Those associated with it would have been filled with esprit de corps.

Back then, it was called the Income Tax Department Employees Co-operative Canteen. A lot of vegetable-washing water has since flowed down the sink.

The esprit de corps from the past continues in an altered form, but the structures are supported by a cladding of formality. In 1991, employees of the canteen were declared regular government employees. Now present in three addresses belonging to the Department, the scale of its operations has increased astronomically.

The canteen with its three units — at Aayakar Bhawan campus on Uthamar Gandhi Salai, BSNL building at Greams Road and Investigation Building at Uthamar Gandhi Salai — is administered by a “Managing Committee which is constituted by the Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax. The Committee is chaired by an officer in the rank of Commissioner.”

With the idioms of food-making now having changed, being aligned with sustainability goals, the canteen has incorporated the required processes into its workaday functioning.

Today’s food waste goes into a bio-gas plant to fuel next day’s gastronomic preparations. A written summary of the other axiomatic principles includes: No single use plastic. Mantara leaves for parcel services. Used cooked oil going to “a designated FSSAI-certified bio-diesel manufacturer”. And as a committee member puts it, the used oil is not being sold outside to prevent it from being reused.

Recently, The Hindu Downtowntook a tour of the canteen at Aayakar Bhawan campus — called Annam — for an understanding of its internal workings. The most striking aspect of the expansive kitchen is the array of boilers, “used for steam cooking of vegetables, rice, dal and thus preventing loss of essential nutrients.”