One evening in October, Meena Sonawane, a domestic worker living in a slum in the Mumbai suburb of Chembur, cooked dinner with the only food in her kitchen: rice. She mixed red chili powder into the rice, then carefully divided it into three portions for her children, keeping two spoonfuls for herself.

A day before, the last money she had left was spent at the hospital where her husband had died after a brief illness. In the commotion, she missed her daily pickup of the free meals handed out by a local nonprofit.

“I felt gutted to feed them just rice and chili,” 34-year-old Sonawane said. “But there was no choice.”

For more than 600 days — since India’s first coronavirus lockdown in early 2020 — the Sonawane family has depended on food aid. Even as the number of coronavirus cases has diminished, another crisis has unfolded in homes across the country: With high unemployment and a record contraction in the economy following two nationwide lockdowns, families like the Sonawanes lost both their purchasing power and savings and can now scarcely afford three meals a day.

There are no nationwide numbers on the state of food insecurity in India, but recent studies point to an alarming problem. In the 2021 Global Hunger Index released in October, India ranked 101st of the 116 countries surveyed, falling seven spots from the previous year. In a separate 2020 survey by Azim Premji University in Bangalore, 90 percent of respondents reported a reduction in food intake due to the lockdown. Twenty percent of respondents continued to battle the problem even six months later.