A plate of nutritious food for just ₹5 — that is the promise Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel renewed on Friday, October 16, 2026, when he e-inaugurated 101 new Shramik Annapurna Yojana centres from Ahmedabad, expanding the state's subsidised meal network for construction workers to 28 districts across Gujarat. The launch was held under the Seva Sankalp Abhiyan, a statewide campaign marking 25 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's public service.

A chief minister behind the counter at Chaankya Puri

The numbers tell one story; the image tells another. CM Bhupendra Patel did not observe the launch from a podium — he showed up at the Annapurna Centre at Chanakya Puri Bridge, Ahmedabad, tied on a serving apron, and personally ladled out meals to construction workers. The CMO described the gesture as a demonstration of samvedanshilta (sensitivity) towards the labour community — and as moments of outreach go, it landed squarely on the campaign's stated theme of direct public service.

How the scheme grew: from 20 districts to 28

The Shramik Annapurna Yojana was already running 293 centres across 20 districts before today's addition. Those existing centres were, according to the CMO, distributing an average of more than 35,000 meals daily, with a cumulative total of over 5 crore meals served since the scheme's inception. The 101 new centres are projected to add roughly 10,000 meals per day to that count, pushing daily capacity to approximately 45,000 meals. Eight districts that had no coverage under the scheme now come under its net.

Construction workers and Gujarat's unorganised labour base

The scheme targets one of the most economically exposed groups in the state's workforce: daily-wage construction labourers and their families, who often lack access to affordable, nutritious food near work sites. Gujarat's construction sector supports hundreds of thousands of migrant and local workers, many operating without formal employment contracts or benefits. At ₹5 per meal — a price point that has remained the scheme's hallmark — the Yojana is designed to remove cost as a barrier to adequate nutrition during a working day.

The expansion sits within a broader pattern of Gujarat incrementally scaling welfare infrastructure for the unorganised sector, building scheme coverage district by district rather than launching a single all-at-once rollout. The linkage to the Seva Sankalp Abhiyan and PM Modi's 25-year public-service milestone frames today's launch as both a welfare action and a political tribute — the BJP-led state government tying its ground-level delivery record to the Prime Minister's larger governance narrative.

With 394 centres now operational and daily meal targets nudging toward 45,000, the next metric that matters is actual uptake: whether the new centres in the eight freshly covered districts can match or exceed the attendance rates the original network has built over its operational years.