Anand Sinha

Anand Sinha is a co-founder of the Robin Hood Army, the volunteer network that redistributes surplus restaurant food to people who cannot afford to eat, which he started in Delhi in August 2014 with Neel Ghose and Aarushi Batra.

The model was taken from Re-Food, a volunteer food-recovery programme in Portugal, and adapted to Indian conditions. The first distribution took place under a flyover in Hauz Khas and fed about fifty people. The founders concluded almost immediately that a weekly meal for fifty would change nothing in a country with hundreds of millions of hungry people, and that the organisation therefore had to be built for rapid replication rather than for depth in one place.

The design choices that followed have defined it. The Robin Hood Army accepts no money at all: it takes only surplus or freshly cooked food from restaurant partners and donations in kind, which removes the need for fundraising, accounts and paid staff, and means a new chapter can start anywhere two or three people are willing to organise it. Volunteers, called Robins, are mostly students and young professionals who do the work in their own time, and each chapter is expected to look after its own locality. Growth has been driven largely through social media and through set-piece campaigns on Independence Day, which have mobilised volunteers in both India and Pakistan and served more than a million meals in a single day. The organisation has since spread to several hundred cities across a dozen countries and added the Robin Hood Academy, which teaches street children and helps enrol them in government schools.[2][3]