The Amma of all brands

The sambar rice is piping hot, full of three kinds of vegetables and tastes good and fresh. The curd rice is tasty too, and not sour, a feat that many restaurants find hard to manage. The servings are generous. But this is not a food review – it is one’s experience of Brand Amma, specifically, the canteens that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, known popularly as Amma, has set up all over the State since last year.

Amma Unavagams, as they are known, serve meals at heavily subsidised rates and seem to be a hit, going by the crowds lining up for meals there. Among other items, an idli costs ₹1, sambar rice costs ₹5 per plate, and curd rice ₹3.

The Amma brand of inexpensive alternatives does not end there. There is the Amma brand of water, which costs ₹10 per litre, and salt, of which there are many varieties, costing less than their counterparts from other brands. Latest in the line are pharmacies where the prices of medicines are 10-15 per cent cheaper than those offered by private chemists. Tea, corporation hostels and movie theatres are said to be in the pipeline.

It is the Amma Unavagams that have attracted a lot of attention. The Chief Minister has ordered the opening of 360 more, which would mean 654 in all, soon, across the State, says the official Web site. They have a Facebook page too, which is updated with news of expansion and achievements. Recently, officials from Egypt visited the canteens to see if they could pick up lessons for use in their country. So did the Gujarat government. The Government has enabled location tracking on the internet and via SMS. And while the customers are mostly the poor and the needy, there are also the software executives, medical students and well-heeled among them.

cat.a.lyst spoke to some patrons of the canteens. It is cheap, but as cat.a.lyst found out, that is not making people overlook the quality on offer. The consensus is that the food is decent, the place reasonably clean, and that some dishes are better at certain locations than others. In Chennai, the aim is to have them in all the wards of the Corporation.

Brand Amma has attracted criticism, not to mention questions about its future. It is seen as the use of government funds for personal branding, expected to affect the business of pushcart food vendors, there are questions about the sources of funding and the fate of the schemes if Amma’s party, the AIADMK, loses an Assembly election.

It is not unusual for one government to undo the acts of another. When Jayalalithaa came to power in 2011, her decision to convert the new Secretariat building, built and inaugurated by the previous government, into a super-speciality hospital met with relatively little disapproval. However, the proposal to shift the Anna Centenary Library in Chennai from its current location and convert that building into a paediatric speciality hospital faced much outrage.

A government executive involved with the Amma brand who does not want to be identified says the public will be the best safeguard against their discontinuation. These are popular schemes, beneficial to both the public and the women employed there, and we are committed to keeping the prices constant, he says, adding that commerce is not an important part of it. In Chennai, where there are 203 Amma Unavagams, an estimated 2.5 lakh eat there daily. It is a challenging scheme as there is no dedicated staff but everyone is pitching in, and there have been no major complaints about quality either, says the official.

Ramanujam Sridhar, CEO of Bangalore-based brand communications consultancy brand-comm, says if the canteens and other welfare schemes are run efficiently and the prices are sustained, private enterprise should be worried. There are reports of some restaurant chains having dropped prices.

Sridhar says Tamil Nadu as a market has always been brand-savvy. Annapoorni, who works as a household help in Chennai, eats there often. She also owns a grinder that comes with the Amma logo on it. Her children own a laptop and a cycle given for free by this government. Annapoorni says she has more faith in these products and schemes because they are branded ‘Amma’.

If the schemes make a lasting impact, they could work well for Jayalalithaa at the hustings, says Sridhar. “It’s an interesting example of public enterprise leading up to self-promotion,” he says. According to him, this is also the making of a larger-than-life image for her and she has a headstart in that she is now synonymous with the AIADMK, having started off as Selvi (Miss) Jayalalithaa and moved on to being Amma.