 Okay, right now we are going to hear from our winners. It's an amazing opportunity for us to be inspired by these Young leaders who are going to do so many great things with their lives starting right now 10-minute format you could almost think of it as a short TED Talk style Well, they're gonna talk to you about their idea and hopefully move you to contribute in some way that you see fit First of all, let us put our hands together for our Young Leaders Award winner, Mr. Ankit Kawatra Thank you. Thank you so much for Honoring me with this award. I'm truly humbled in every way and of course so inspired needless to say as every one of you is By the great line of our speakers that was there yesterday and today this morning Of course the jury panel for choosing us so and of course the leadership of Iklif Rajeev and Asashree for getting us here together. It's amazing to be here and being among all of you I have 10 minutes. I need to rush. So and I'm going to do exactly that Before I start I want to tell you what I'm going to be talking about it's going to be a bit about my journey and What my life has been maybe a couple of learnings that I've had but just before I start I Want to do a quick exercise. This is typically what I do when I enter rooms in other countries. So let's start How many of you had more than two meals of food yesterday? Sure fans You don't you don't raise two hands. You just show one hand. That's enough. That's right Everyone okay, how many of you let's make this stuff for this too easy. How many of you remember what you ate yesterday Okay, how many of you remember what you ate the day before that? What about the day before that so three days before that? No, okay, this is what I imagined right well, I'll tell you and unfortunately on a serious note There are more than 800 million people who are just not like this, right? They who do not have access to even the most basic food in the world That's one out of every nine people on the planet and to put it in perspective our 500 guests present In this audience today one in nine that's almost 45 to 50 people who do not have access to basic food My question to you is what if you were one of those 50 people who didn't have access to food? How would you feel? How would you provide your family? What would you tell your child? And that's the thing right food is one of those things which is so important That we almost almost forget how important it is right isn't it and I have to confess I Have to confess something when I was told the same story about the importance of food and the number of hungry people in the planet Many many years ago in school. I quickly forgot it and this largely because We're embraced with so many challenges and issues that our world faces today You you talk about issues such as climate change Issues such as access to basic drinking water or sanitation or proper education and most recently issues such as presidents of most countries Right. I'm gonna get called out for that one but And I and I and I honestly didn't remember this much But one moment came in my life and everything changed and a moment before you start guessing I'll tell you when that moment was The moment was in a big fat Indian wedding now for those of you don't know Indian weddings are like massive carnivals They last over days sometimes weeks and they have a lot of cultural events. This is more pictures to get you hungry But usually they have a lot of dances festivals and the one thing that's really common among all events is a great amount of food So this wedding that I'd gone on what was so special about it? Well for one I Was not invited to the wedding. I was crashing the wedding right so I've gone with my friends and We love the food so we were there and why we were enjoying this great food a thought came to my mind I thought it comes to everyone's mind No genius here What would happen to that extra food that's left in the dishes when the guests had gone? So I went up to the caterer and I thought okay. I'm not going to learn about the systems the processes the storage and everything And he obliviously told me no no no you don't know we throw away all this food. I Was shocked. I was how can you throw away all that food? But what was most surprising was what he said next? He said that that night from that wedding food for 5,000 people was going to get wasted I'm talking about the food in the dishes not the food in the plates only the untouched food 5,000 people I came back home I just couldn't sleep over and I started researching and found out that every caterer and the entire food industry of India for Decades has been following the same archaic practice throwing away the success food because there's no system as such So I started learning I learned about food waste I learned that when we do not eat food when we throw it into the dustbin and goes to these massive places called landfills What it sits it decomposes it produces methane gas and it damages our own environment Here's a picture of a landfill, which is right close to my house 10 miles. So this was 12 stories high and Last year this landfill had a landslide It was that huge Now that wedding when I learned about food wastage, I couldn't help but think about the irony of the situation Hunger is not new. We all know about it. We don't need lessons on the quantity of this But this was not just any country. I come from India Now if I ask most people which country has the highest number of hungry people in the world They usually are very quick to say an African nation and that's why I'm here to break that myth It's India. We were not proud of it, but it's true a quarter of the world's hungry population Almost 200 million people come from India who do not have enough food to eat To put it in perspective the number of hungry people in India is more than six times the population of the country of Malaysia Right But you know, sometimes when we get we talk about millions we talk about billions trillions We get we get lost in the in the numbers. We forget what the real cause was I had the opportunity to meet a couple of these people who was really suffering from hunger At people who want to point out today is one is Alumgir a 13-year-old boy who I met on the streets of my city who would take an injection here on his left hand once every week It was a drug. He would take that injection and then eat sleep for a week He'd wake up after five or six days not having any food completely dehydrated and then take one of those injections again I met another boy Deepak like one of the hundreds of thousands of kids working in garbage dumps because their parents were forcing them to work there He was involved in no formal education and he would segregate the plastic from the glass to sell of that plastic and earn a few hundred rupees To get maybe one or maybe two meals a day These were people who were truly suffering from hunger. They had no food security If they did not earn for themselves or find other solace, they would not be able to live When I put this equation together it was kind of obvious isn't it? Well first off when you look at the slide, what do you think? Well, I think that if Elon Musk was selecting a planet to go to This would not be it We're so inefficient in The way we've grown and we've been so reckless with the way we've grown or the 800 million people who are hungry at 30% of all the food more than wasted just recklessly So I thought as a 22 year old boy. Let me do whatever I can I went to all the public agencies in my city all the private enterprises all the leaders who I was really inspired by And I knocked that door and I said can you do something about it? It seems to be some flaw some someone's really forgotten how to you know, we just miss this I think the last decades or something with someone forgot to take care of this So come out and let's take action on this and I was surprised to see It's somewhere all that leadership that I was inspired why I was not backed by action The people who are respected the most heads of companies were not willing to take it up non-profits Well, I thought would be more generous towards coming towards You know helping people in causes with a lease involved because they were any ways living on such frugal resources. I Went to friends. I went to colleagues and most people thought I'd lost my mind a lot of people were very quick to say that Non-profits is usually the kind of work that governments should do social problems is not what we need to do and I was really really surprised That's when I decided I it as a 22 year old I was even more angry than I'm right now and I decided that I need to take action in my own hands So I went to a kid to my right near my house. I went four times five times You must know I go and invited a lot So I I kept going and finally he said, you know what this boy is not gonna go. Let's give him the extra food He's not gonna charge for it. Let's let him do whatever he wants. That was the first night I picked up the first meal my own hands packed in my own containers dropped a bit in the car and then went and donated to a family of 25 The feeling of knowing that that solution can actually be bridged hunger and food wastage. I Didn't get it from a leader. I got it on action on ground And that's when I realized that I wanted to do more. I wanted to feed more people But I was working in my own job. I wasn't able to do anything I was I was in the entire night I was out without telling my parents going collecting this food and the morning was back to office sleeping a couple of hours In office and so it came to a very rational choice for me either I pursue my job Or I take this up and so the next morning I quit my job literally and I started my organization feeding in there and quite literally Well feeding it was very simple. I wanted to connect more people. So I involve the youth I said why not come with me and now let's go and donate more food So we went to restaurants cafeteria's packed food in our own cars and started donating it But we face a big hurdle. There was a lot of food that was being wasted So we started another program called magic wheels, which was a more structured program where a Refrigerated van goes to fixed places like almost like an uber pool and it goes and picks from five or six locations And then it feeds people on a daily basis providing food support daily But we realized that we're spending too much time on the road. So we decided let's set up community refrigerators Wherever there's excess food left this means free of cost community fridges placed in residential or commercial areas And anyone who has excess food anyone can go and keep it inside and people who need food who are hungry Can go and take up as much as they want with dignity and Lastly in areas where excess food was not enough We launched kitchens especially to motivate these kids to come back to school and parents to send the kids back to school Not send them to garbage dumps and that's where portion to parchala or food for education was born of Course today feeding in there from those very very humble beginnings and me quitting my job without telling my parents It's come to completely different life in five years working with more than 25,000 hunger heroes of volunteers We now are spread in hundred cities and are now India's largest food recovery network So we're really really proud of that and we've been able to serve more than 31 million meals to people in need across the country Of course along the way we've received a lot of awards and you know, whether it was the Queen of England or the Prime Minister of a country Bill Gates or United Nations, but while these are the things that are spoken about more What we really proud of is how we've been able to change a mindset the fact that you can go and challenge assumptions And what feeding in a story also goes to prove is that big problems like hunger and poverty are sometimes they don't need big Solutions sometimes big problems can be solved by simple and small solutions Which may or may not come from people who we most associate as leaders, so I want to leave you with this a Final thought to what comes to my mind Leadership is not about age a lot of people still Think about it as an age factor. It's definitely not about age. I leave you with a quote, which I heard recently Leadership is not about age. It's about the impact the influence and inspiration relief If that was the mantra, we were all following the generations to come Would be inspired by what we transfer today. So thank you so much for having me here