A study of barriers for adoption and growth of food banks in India using hybrid DEMATEL and Analytic Network Process

Abstract

Food banks play a significant role to ensure food security through surplus food recovery and redistribution to economically deprived and marginalized people. Food bank is a recent phenomenon in several countries including India. The purpose of this paper is to identify challenges and barriers that impede the growth and adoption of food banks in the Indian context and to evaluate critical barriers by prioritizing them. A total of 14 barriers have been identified through literature survey, qualitative interviews with different stakeholders of food banks in India and expert's inputs. These barriers have been clustered into 7 categories - Policy and regulation, financial resources, infrastructure and human resources, planning and coordination, knowledge, uncertainty, and characteristics of food, of main barriers. Then, DEMATEL is used to find the cause-effect relationship among the identified barriers. A network of inter-relationship among the identified barriers is devised using Analytic Network Process (ANP) using the output from DEMATEL. Results of DEMATEL indicates that lack of planning and coordination is the most significant barrier that hinders the growth and sustenance of food banks in India. Also, lack of infrastructure and human resources are the major effect of the other barriers. Further, the financial barrier attains maximum weight in the ANP process and came out to be the most critical barrier. This study can be help food banks and policy makers to devise the plans for sustenance of the food banks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt ever to identify and prioritize the barriers for the food banks. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd