Neel Ghose

Neel Ghose is one of the founders, with Aarushi Batra and Anand Sinha, of the Robin Hood Army, a volunteer network that moves surplus food from restaurants to people who are going hungry.

The organisation began in New Delhi in 2014 and was built on a deliberate constraint: it accepts no money. Volunteers, called Robins, collect food that restaurants, hotels and caterers would otherwise discard and distribute it directly to people living on the streets and in slums, orphanages, night shelters, old-age homes and public hospitals. Because there is no fundraising and no payroll, chapters can be started by anyone willing to organise a local group, and growth has come through social media rather than through central expansion. Ghose has argued the case for the model in public talks, including at TEDxGateway.

The network spread quickly across Indian cities and, in February 2015, to Karachi in Pakistan, later reaching Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico and Australia. Its annual Independence Day drives, run jointly by Indian and Pakistani volunteers, grew from serving around 78,000 people in 2015 to more than a million meals in 2017 and about two million in 2018. In 2016 volunteers organised the transport of drinking water by train to drought-hit Latur in Maharashtra.

In July 2016 the group added the Robin Hood Academy, weekly classes and excursions for children living on the streets, with volunteers also helping to enrol them in government schools. The organisation reports more than 200,000 volunteers in over 230 cities across sixteen countries.[2][3]