A Helping of Goodwill

When the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) first began a modest tiffin service for a few office-goers in Ahmedabad, no one could have guessed that those humble lunchboxes would one day spark a café movement.

- By ANIL MULCHANDANI

It was called Kamla Café-named in honour of the late Professor Kamla Chowdhry, one of SEWA's strongest supporters-and it started not as a business, but as a food and nutrition training initiative back in 2018.

"We really took baby steps," recalls Uma Swaminathan Iyer, the café's managing director, with a laugh. "None of us had any experience in the food or hospitality industry. We just knew we wanted clean air, a green space, and food made with love from locally grown vegetables, millets, and barley."