Mukti Community Shop on Wheels

Sundarbans, a cluster of remote villages in the southern part of West Bengal, are facing the following situations triggered by COVID-19.

(i) Complete disruption of the producer-retailer-seller chain leading to widely varying prices of commodities from one location to another. This is bound to have serious repercussions with the local people, who are mostly very poor.

(ii) Most of them are now jobless and even struggling for a one time meal.

(ii) Village markets are kept open for about a couple of hours. This creates massive footfall. Consequently, social distancing is not maintained.

(iii) The twin tragedy of Covid & Amphan completely devastated life of the local people. The damaged due to cyclone expected to be around 95% in Sundarbans.

As a response, MCS has been envisaged and activated as a pilot project to mitigate these adverse effects in the following manner. 

i) Delivering food and essential items door to door. Only those wearing masks are entertained.

ii) Operating as a zero-margin model - selling and buying price are same. Price of items are pre-decided by members of the local village community to ensure fairness.  

iii) Allowing transaction in kind. This innovative feature facilitates exchange of surplus items which can be part of home yield (farm products or poultry) with something else. 

iv) Employment generation for local people who have been rendered jobless because of the current scenario.

v) Sale of locally produce material which will boost the confidence among people and also increase the source of livelihood for them.

MCS, is already in operation with 10 mobile shops/vans and is covering a geographical area housing about 7000 family. External grant support is immediately required to expand the reach of this model and sustain it over a period of time.

To have a meaningful social impact over a larger region, MUKTI has set an immediate target of catering to at least 50000 families through 70 vans over the next 6 months.

i) At present, MCS is covering 7000 families through 10 shopping vans. This mechanism has been put in place using MUKTI’s own resources.

ii) The next immediate target is scale-up the operations and reach out to an area housing 50000 families and serve for the next 6 months

iii) Scaling up of the operation in terms of hiring man power can be readily addressed by using MUKTI’s own resources and wide network in Sundarbans.

iv) It is estimated that once the necessary financial resources are available, it would take about 2 months to scale-up the operations to 70 -80 shops & leading to increase in source of income.