Early this month, Chitresh Sinha, founder of The Plated Project, received a photograph on his phone. A school friend had shared the picture of a billboard, advertising Sinha’s brainchild. “It was a proud and humbling moment, at the same time, to see how far a small idea has come,” he says. The ad announcing ‘The Plated Project’, a short film on an initiative to end hunger crises in the country, was put up by Meta (formerly Facebook) under their ‘Good Ideas Deserve to be Found’ programme.
“The film came about through sheer serendipity. Facebook and their team saw our work online around three months back and reached out to know more,” says Sinha. The film, directed by Anand Gandhi of The Ship of Theseus fame, is running across television channels, theatres and on various digital platforms. Through the 2.5-minute-long film, the tech giant wanted to make people aware of the work of small business owners.
Sinha believes the film will help more people to donate to a cause. “Hunger is a symptom of bigger inequalities in the society. We need the larger population to move from empathy and actually engage with the cause. Hence, the idea of ‘Buy a Plate, Fill a Plate’ came up,” he says. In the recently released Global Hunger Index 2021, India has slipped to the 101st position among 116 countries, placed behind Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Earlier this year, The Plated Project also featured at the Art Basel Hong Kong 2021. “The event helped us popularise the project on an international scale,” says Sinha.
Launched in 2019, the project claims to have sponsored 511,400 meals around the world. By joining hands with, artists they create one-of-a-kind plates that cost between Rs 700 and Rs 3,000. The proceeds from selling the plates are handed over to organisations fighting hunger. “Buying these art plates delivers the double advantage of contribution for the hungry and owing a work by artists,” says Sinha, the 38-year-old CEO of Chlorophyll Innovation Lab, Mumbai, an organisation that works on social impact projects.
The designs on the ceramic plates change every month depending on the issue picked up by the platform. “For instance, our last collection was on creating awareness about deafness,” Sinha says. For it, he collaborated with a bunch of poets who used the spoken word as a medium and it was put on plates along with the artists’ work. “Through this collection, we wanted to put emphasis on expanding the horizon of communication,” he says. The funds helped sponsor 20,000 meals. The series included works of poets like Karuna Ezara Parikh and Pratishtha Khattar Ishpunani.