Can anyone really live on Rs. 26 a day, the income of the officially poor in rural India? Two youngsters try it out.

Late last year, two young men decided to live a month of their lives on the income of an average poor Indian. One of them, Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment banker in the US and Singapore. The other, Matt, migrated as a teenager to the States with his parents, and studied in MIT. Both decided at different points to return to India, joined the UID Project in Bengaluru, came to share a flat, and became close friends.

The idea suddenly struck them one day. Both had returned to India in the vague hope that they could be of use to their country. But they knew the people of this land so little. Tushar suggested one evening — “Let us try to understand an ‘average Indian’, by living on an ‘average income’.” His friend Matt was immediately captured by the idea. They began a journey which would change them forever.

To begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? They calculated that India’s Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month, or Rs. 150 a day. Globally people spend about a third of their incomes on rent. Excluding rent, they decided to spend Rs. 100 each a day. They realised that this did not make them poor, only average. Seventy-five per cent Indians live on less than this average.

The young men moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help, much to her bemusement. What changed for them was that they spent a large part of their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were expensive and therefore used sparingly, meat was out of bounds, as were processed food like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil. Both are passionate cooks with healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a wonder food — affordable and high on proteins, and worked on many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were cheap: 25 paise for 27 calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on biscuits. It was their treat each day.

Restricted life

Living on Rs.100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They found that they could not afford to travel by bus more than five km in a day. If they needed to go further, they could only walk. They could afford electricity only five or six hours a day, therefore sparingly used lights and fans. They needed also to charge their mobiles and computers. One Lifebuoy soap cut into two. They passed by shops, gazing at things they could not buy. They could not afford the movies, and hoped they would not fall ill.

However, the bigger challenge remained. Could they live on Rs. 32, the official poverty line, which had become controversial after India’s Planning Commission informed the Supreme Court that this was the poverty line for cities (for villages it was even lower, at Rs. 26 per person per day)?

Harrowing experience

For this, they decided to go to Matt’s ancestral village Karucachal in Kerala, and live on Rs. 26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and banana and drank black tea: a balanced diet was impossible on the Rs. 18 a day which their briefly adopted ‘poverty’ permitted. They found themselves thinking of food the whole day. They walked long distances, and saved money even on soap to wash their clothes. They could not afford communication, by mobile and internet. It would have been a disaster if they fell ill. For the two 26-year-olds, the experience of ‘official poverty’ was harrowing.

Yet, when their experiment ended with Deepavali, they wrote to their friends: “Wish we could tell you that we are happy to have our ‘normal’ lives back. Wish we could say that our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights ago was as satisfying as we had been hoping for throughout our experiment. It probably was one of the best meals we’ve ever had, packed with massive amounts of love from our hosts. However, each bite was a sad reminder of the harsh reality that there are 400 million people in our country for whom such a meal will remain a dream for quite some time. That we can move on to our comfortable life, but they remain in the battlefield of survival — a life of tough choices and tall constraints. A life where freedom means little and hunger is plenty…

Plenty of questions

It disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now consider excesses. Do we really need that hair product or that branded cologne? Is dining out at expensive restaurants necessary for a happy weekend? At a larger level, do we deserve all the riches we have around us? Is it just plain luck that we were born into circumstances that allowed us to build a life of comfort? What makes the other half any less deserving of many of these material possessions, (which many of us consider essential) or, more importantly, tools for self-development (education) or self-preservation (healthcare)?

We don’t know the answers to these questions. But we do know the feeling of guilt that is with us now. Guilt that is compounded by the love and generosity we got from people who live on the other side, despite their tough lives. We may have treated them as strangers all our lives, but they surely didn’t treat us as that way…”

So what did these two friends learn from their brief encounter with poverty? That hunger can make you angry. That a food law which guarantees adequate nutrition to all is essential. That poverty does not allow you to realise even modest dreams. And above all — in Matt’s words — that empathy is essential for democracy.

ALEXIS SUGRUE’S T-shirt promised “Simple food. Endless choices.” Like the stylized elephant logo on her black ball cap and the cheerful step-by-step menu on the wall here at Bombay Bowl, the slogan could have been developed by a corporate branding office. (“All for me and naan for you,” read the paper sleeves for the Indian flatbread, browned in a conveyor-belt oven.)

Her patter sounded as if it was developed for Chipotle Grill, then filtered through the Indian subcontinent.

“Would you like to make that a bowl, a plate or a roti roll?” asked Ms. Sugrue, ponytailed and pierced, as she served curried chickpeas and panini-pressed chicken sandwiches with vindaloo sauce from a steam table. “What kind of protein would you like? Would you like to spice that up or down?”

Tucked between a strip mall Starbucks and a Jamba Juice, at the back door of a Chipotle Grill, Bombay Bowl is one of a number of Indian restaurants whose owners are thinking big no matter how small they are. Borrowing the assembly-line format, customized service and chipper style of national chains like Subway, they plan to make dals, curries, chutneys and flatbreads into fast-food choices from coast to coast.

None see curry houses as their competitors. “My competition is Panera, Qdoba and Chipotle,” said Amar Singh, owner of Bombay Bowl, which still has only one location. Sharing his vision are the owners of restaurants like Merzi in Washington, D.C., and Chutney’s, with two locations in Cambridge, Mass.

“We realize that some of this food can be intimidating to non-Indian consumers,” said Sanjay Kansagra, the proprietor of Chutney’s, where the slogan is “Savor the flavor.” “So we put them in control of their meal.”

The menu boards and signs at his restaurant, in a mall off Harvard Square, encourage customers to “make it a value meal” by adding a side dish of a steamed dumpling called a momo to a paratha wrap girded with mashed potatoes and peas.

Across the food court, customers lined up to get Subway value meals.

As his employees — one in a turban, the others in black visors, all wearing orange polo shirts with the smiling, lip-smacking lime that is Chutney’s logo — folded rounds of naan over chicken tikka, he talked about the commissary he planned to build to provide the food for a total of 10 Chutney’s.

Like many of the Indian entrepreneurs working in this segment, he conceived his business to satisfy a market need, not his passion for cooking.

“I knew I wanted to serve food that would taste authentic,” said Mr. Kansagra, who opened three franchised sandwich shops before turning his attention to Indian fast food in 2009. “I also knew that if I wanted to get American customers, the food did not necessarily have to be authentic.”

Willingness to embrace the inauthentic served the entrepreneur well as he developed rice bowls topped with cubes of curried cheese and “nanini” sandwiches stuffed with lamb seekh kebab.

Liberal interpretations of traditional foods also appeal to his customers.

“This reminds me of Wow Bao,” said one, Monique Bellefleur, referring to a five-unit Chicago chain that advertises “hot Asian buns” and serves breakfast bao stuffed with egg, bacon and Cheddar.

Indian food, served fast, has been around since the 1970s. That’s when curry houses in larger cities across the United States began to serve steam-table lunches of lamb vindaloo, basmati rice and creamed spinach with cheese.

Buffet service allowed consumers unfamiliar with foods from the subcontinent to survey the offerings and serve themselves toned-down versions of provincial cooking from Kashmir or Andhra Pradesh. Restaurateurs could serve large volumes of lunchtime customers quickly.

These new restaurants are different.

“Indian entrepreneurs are now trying to serve the American mainstream, whatever that is,” said Krishnendu Ray, an assistant professor of food studies at New York University.

Some inspiration for these chains-in-the-making came from the subcontinent. Jumbo King, based in Mumbai, now serves potato croquettes on hamburger-style buns at more than 40 fast-food outlets. Kati Zone, based in Bangalore, dishes up variants on Mexican quesadillas called “cheeserias” as well as masala-dusted French fries.

In the United States, kati rolls and other flatbread-wrapped foods have been popular for at least a decade. Paratha Junction in Jersey City and the Kati Roll Company, with locations in New York City and London, are two of the quick-service restaurant companies that specialize in portable Indian foods.

Many of these newfangled foods are being built on bases of relatively authentic Indian flatbreads.

Merzi, one of these nascent chains, serves roti wraps, stuffed with “tandisserie” chicken, at its Washington prototype. (The menu translates the term as “tandoori-seasoned chicken cooked rotisserie style.”) Veda, with three locations in Toronto, recently introduced rice-and-butter-chicken-stuffed “curritos,” which translate as curried burrito-style wraps.

No matter how they label their menu boards, these places follow the same formula. “We have to break down traditional dishes into gravy and protein components so that our guests can gain control of their experience, and build their own meal,” said Mr. Singh of Bombay Bowl, who has an undergraduate degree in finance and a master’s degree in business administration. “It’s all about deconstruction. We have to deconstruct Indian food so that it can appeal to the mainstream public. With deconstruction, everything is possible.”

Customers like Sheila Ovenhouse of Parker, Colo., a Denver suburb, follow menu instructions to build their dishes from unfamiliar ingredients.

“Otherwise, I’d be overwhelmed,” she said one recent night.

The menu has customers choose to have their meal in a bowl, on a salad or in a roti wrap, then “pick a healthy filling,” like grilled chicken or tofu. They then pick one of four sauces, including spinach and vindaloo, and one of four chutneys, including cool cucumber raita or a hot chile-lime chutney. “Look at Chipotle, look at Subway,” Mr. Singh said. “What they did was create an assembly line, where you could watch other people’s food being made and direct the making of your own food.”

Last September, Chipotle Grill, which was built on Americanized Mexican foods, began applying that assembly line model to the foods of Southeast Asia. Their ShopHouse Kitchen, off Dupont Circle in Washington, serves rice bowls, noodle bowls and versions of the Vietnamese sandwich banh mi.

If Indian fast food is to reach a wider audience, Chipotle, with its quality ingredients and guest-defined customization, will likely prove the lodestar.

It would be easy to say that such developments dumb down Indian food, Dr. Ray said. But ethnicity is no longer defined in opposition to the mainstream. “A new Indian cosmopolitanism has emerged,” he said. “This new generation of Indians expects their customers to know what a dosa is. They expect their customers to figure out what a samosa is. They’re confident. They’re not embarrassed by their accents. They’re not embarrassed by their foods.”

“They’ve learned American fast food,” he added, “and they’ve made it their own.”