In my previous blog I spoke about kapda via the waterless washing machine. Let me address the roti (literally) today.
In my langar with a dining strength of 80 troops present at any time (our company strength was 216) we made roughly 600 chapattis for every lunch and dinner and 200 puris for every breakfast. A total of 4+1 people would start 2 to 3 hours earlier to get the meals out in time. Of these 2 would be cooks and balance would be the combatant soldiers from the platoon rotation and they would be assisted by the langar commander. A huge number of man-hours spent in making puris and chapattis. If we multiply this number by total number of units in peace ...
Krispy Kreme is famous for selling donuts. What they are more famous for is their automatic donut machine. Their donuts go very well with cold full fat milk. Watch this video for the donut machine.
Back to rotis. I buy rotis from Costco and came across a program "How things work?" in Discovery channel where they showed how these rotis are made with machines - kneading the dough, rolling them out, roasting them. Compared to the rotis made in langar these are quite good - not dry, soft, do not become rubbery after a few hours. And I keep them outside for a week without them going bad.
So why cannot each unit be provided such an automatic roti maker - it can make 2000 rotis per hour. In 2 hours we can have rotis for the entire unit ready. Add a fryer machine at the end and puris are a breeze. We go back to hand cooking once units are in field / exercise areas. But during peace posting spending those valuable hours on cooking food is wrong focus.
I have seen GOC asking for innovations - I hope that someone among you can point this innovation - I had not known about it till I saw Krispy Kreme and then the Discovery programme. Is it costly? No, not at all. And on a volume scale the prices could be driven down further.
It is important that we place the value of time or more important the opportunity cost associated with every soldier.
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