“Is it fair to be paid Rs.10,000 a month for working seven hours a day, seven days a week, with no holidays in a year?” Vandana, who hands out tokens at the Atal Canteen in Bhanwar Singh Camp, Delhi, has not been paid for two months. The five-member staff feeds nearly 600 people a day across two shifts. “We are government employees serving the public, like any other bureaucrat,” she said.

On December 25, 2025, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs Manohar Lal Khattar launched the Atal Canteen Scheme on Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 101st birth anniversary. Of the 100 promised locations, 45 were inaugurated that day. As of April 2026, 74 are operational.

The MLA’s office in R.K. Puram, where Bhanwar Singh Camp falls, told Frontline that workers had been paid their dues. Ghanshyam, manager at the Rewards NGO that runs six canteens in the area, including this one, said salaries were a month behind. The NGO itself, he said, had not been reimbursed by the government since the launch in December.

The colony of Vasant Vihar gives way to Bhanwar Singh Camp, a three-decade-old cluster of half-built shacks. “Khaane waali jagah?” (the place to eat?), a fruit vendor asked, pointing ahead. “Not many people here know that the facilities are called Atal Canteens,” Vandana said. “People come from Nepali Camp, Munirka, Vasant Vihar, and even Palam.”

About 30 of the originally proposed locations had to be scrapped or revised because of difficulties in acquiring land. P.K. Jha, who oversees the scheme at the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), said hurdles were created by the Railways, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), and residents of certain colonies. “Residents of areas such as Lodhi Gardens are concerned that a majma (crowd) will be created,” he said. The prospect of the working class congregating in well-off colonies was a source of anxiety in those areas.

Ashwini Kumar, Executive Director, Atal Canteens, said clearances for land under the Railways or Defence had led to delays. “By May 15, 2026, we will open all 100 canteens,” he said. Frontline’s queries to the DDA were unanswered at the time of publication.

The Rs.5 thali—600 grams of rotis, rice, dal, a seasonal vegetable, and pickle—follows the Atal Kisan-Mazdoor Canteens that the BJP government in Haryana opened in February 2020. Canteens are open from 10:30 am to 2 pm and 6 pm to 9:30 pm. Food is not cooked on-site but transported in steel containers from large kitchens in places like Rajokri, Ghitorni, and Okhla. According to Kumar, private agencies are hired through tender to run these kitchens and employ canteen staff.

At the Dwarka Sector 1 Atal Canteen, the woman-led Ekta Foundation supplies six centres from a kitchen in Matiala. The token collector Vijay, hired by the foundation, said its food distributors are paid Rs. 15,000 a month, salaries are regular, and used utensils go back to the central kitchen. The Palam canteen is among the better managed; a poster on the wall denies entry to inebriated visitors.

On portion control, Vandana said two ladles each of rice and dal, one of vegetable, and four rotis are served per plate, with second helpings allowed only after the first is eaten. Kamal, a manual labourer at the Begumpur facility, said the food was as good as at home.

Facial Recognition Technology is used to ensure single-session meals are not duplicated, alongside CCTV monitoring and FSSAI-certified hygiene standards. After residents raised privacy concerns and image volumes overwhelmed servers, DUSIB approved auto-deletion of the data after 30 days at its 35th board meeting in April 2026.

Workers’ wages, workers’ weeks

Across centres, salaries vary widely and arbitrarily. Vandana and Anjana, who work at the Begumpur facility and are both token collectors, are paid Rs.10,000; Prakash, doing the same work at the Greater Kailash canteen, is paid Rs.20,000. Cleaners earn between Rs. 4000 and Rs. 12,000 a month. Some are paid by bank transfer, others in cash.

All these wages fall below Delhi’s revised minimum wages, which came into effect on October 1, 2025: Rs.19,846 for unskilled work, Rs.21,813 for semi-skilled, and Rs.23,905 for skilled.

The hours are also outside the law. The canteens do not close on Sundays or national holidays, and Vandana said the staff had worked every day since they were hired. Section 26 of the Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions, 2020— which came into force on November 21, 2025—bars work for more than six days in a week and requires compensatory holidays within two months for any weekly holiday a worker is denied.

Rajan, a security guard at one of the canteens, said he was paid Rs.13,000 a month for a job that required him to sleep at the facility. Ravi, who works at the Ekta Vihar canteen, said he had been beaten four times in four months by drunk visitors. He is paid Rs.16,000 a month and works 14 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. “Everybody runs away from this job because it is very difficult to manage,” he said.

When the workers raised the absence of a weekly holiday, Ghanshyam dismissed the claim: “They are all lying.” Workers, he said, were free to take leave provided they arranged their own substitutes.

The arithmetic of the Rs.5 plate

Each canteen is capped at 500 thalis a session. The eventual goal is one lakh meals a day. Jha said the total outlay had been revised from Rs.104.24 crore to nearly Rs.136 crore on account of inflation and upgrades. The state pays Rs.25 a meal to the agency; the user pays Rs.5; production cost works out to about Rs.30 a plate.

Asked why the rate could not be lowered further on the lines of Tamil Nadu’s Amma Canteens, where idlis cost Re.1, Jha was pragmatic: “Where can you afford idli-sambar for Re.1? Nowhere. Such schemes require heavy subsidies.”

The Amma Unavagam, launched by then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa in February 2013, is the pioneer of the model. Despite enduring popularity and over 650 outlets run by women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs), it has historically run aggregate losses; an independent trust was set up in 2020 to seek corporate funding. A food server at a Tiruchi facility told Frontline the staff worked 5:30 am to 3:30 pm at Rs.325 a day—about Rs.10,000 a month, the same as Vandana.

For beneficiaries, even the Rs.5 fee is contested. “They believe a government scheme should be free, and we have to convince them about the Rs.5,” Vandana said. Workers often serve the impoverished without payment and make up the difference themselves. “Who will ask the impoverished for Rs.5?” Anjana said.

At Ravi’s canteen, the cleaner Mala has not been paid for two months. She washes nearly 500 plates a day for Rs.5,000 a month, which “barely makes me get through with basic expenses at home”.

As the workers at Bhanwar Singh Camp posed for a picture in their aprons, gloves, and hair masks, the pride masked exhaustion. Ghanshyam said the Rewards NGO would open another canteen in Inderpuri in May 2026: “We are eager to open more and take no payment in return, as this is work of utmost importance.”

Vandana put it differently. “This is not charity,” she said, “but a dignified right a citizen earns by paying a sum for each plate.” For that right to be truly dignified, she added, it must eventually extend to those who serve the plates.

Aparna Vats is an intern with Frontline.