SINGAPORE – At 4.30am, when most of Singapore is asleep, a shophouse in Little India stirs to life.
The clanking of rice pots breaks the silence of the early morning, as the aroma of masala fills the air.
By 5.45am, soup kitchen Krsna’s Free Meals is already serving breakfast to migrant workers, some of whom travel to Little India to collect their meals after the night shift.
The initiative was started in 2018 by Ms Latha Govindasamy, her two sisters and their husbands with the aim of serving breakfast, lunch and dinner daily for migrant workers in the area.
While there are organisations that help these workers with medical issues or disputes with employers, Ms Latha felt that there was a lack of affordable food options for them on a daily basis.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, her soup kitchen delivered food packets to migrant workers who could not leave their dormitories.
In 2023, Ms Latha, 56, quit being a private tutor to devote her energy fully to running the soup kitchen, which is now a charity. She had taught in a secondary school before giving tuition.
Her sisters, Ms Chandralatika Devi Dasi, 62, and Ms Gandhini Devi Dasi, 59, had been volunteering as cooks at the temple where Ms Chandralatika’s husband, Mr Raghupati Das, 62, had worked as an accountant.
Ms Gandhini’s husband, Mr Lee Chee Seng, a 59-year-old logistics supervisor, collected vegetables donated by vendors at Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre twice a week.
The family dipped into their own savings to start the soup kitchen, declining to disclose the amount, but they have been able to fully rely on public donations since 2021.
Some 5.5 million meals have been given out by Krsna’s Free Meals, and the number of migrant workers it serves each day has grown from 80 in the beginning to about 4,000 today.
The intention was to provide free meals for migrant workers, said Ms Latha, but many of them wanted to pay.
So a donation box was set up, and those who want to can give a token sum of 50 cents or more.
“The donation gives them a sense of dignity that they are contributing to their food and paying it forward,” she said, adding that some workers will put in extra money to help pay for those who do not have the means to pay.
It has been a particularly busy few days for the soup kitchen preparing for its Deepavali Fiesta for migrant workers, many of whom cannot celebrate the festival with their families back home.
