Raj Prasad (Food)¶

Part of the Aashray Business Logic. Related: Booking Lifecycle, Stay, Rooms & Flats, Adhyayan & Utsav, Payments, Credits & Reconciliation. For implementation detail — exact routes, database structure, and known code-level defects — see the companion Technical Reference — Food.

Raj Prasad is fundamentally a kitchen operation, not a self-service ordering app: staff publish a menu, prepare food against a projected headcount for the next day, and track what actually gets served. A member's meal booking is just one input that feeds that headcount — alongside bulk counts staff enter directly for departments and events — not the whole process.

Staff publish what's being served at each meal for upcoming dates; members see this as a simple menu. Each meal is expected to be served within a fixed daily window (a morning window for breakfast, a midday window for lunch, an evening window for dinner).

Projecting demand for the kitchen¶

The kitchen needs to know, ahead of time, roughly how many of each meal to prepare for the next day. That projected count combines two streams of demand:

Individual bookings. Meals booked person-by-person, by or on behalf of members, guests, and Mumukshus (see "What members request, and who's eligible," below).
Bulk (group) bookings. Some meals aren't booked person-by-person at all. An event or department can instead have a block of meals booked as a headcount — "20 breakfasts, 15 lunches" for a group, rather than 20 or 15 individually named people. This is used for department meals and event/guest groups, and is set up by staff rather than by members themselves. Group bookings aren't billed — no per-meal charge is attached to them.

Staff are given the combined count in advance, and are alerted if the number shifts significantly later in the evening, so the kitchen isn't caught off guard by a late surge or drop in bookings.

Tracking food as served¶

Two separate ways food is tracked as actually served:

Individual plates. At meal time, staff confirm a person's card — in person or by scanning it — to mark that specific meal as served for that person. A meal can only be marked served once, and only if it was actually booked.
Kitchen-wide counts. Separately, kitchen staff keep their own day-by-day, meal-by-meal tally of how many physical plates actually went out, independent of who was checked in, so booked-vs-served-vs-actually-plated can be compared and reconciled.
Group (bulk) bookings track how many plates have been handed out for the group as a running count, rather than as individual scans.

What members request, and who's eligible¶

Three meals a day — breakfast, lunch, and dinner — each bookable independently for a single day or a range of days. Alongside the meal choice, a person picks a spice level (regular or non-spicy) and, separately, a hightea preference (tea, coffee, or none). A booking can be made for the member themselves, for a guest they're hosting, or for one or more Mumukshus they're acting on behalf of — this is the "individual bookings" stream that feeds the kitchen's projected count, above.

Who's eligible to book:

Residents and Seva Kutir members can always book food.
Guests can always book food (and are charged for it — see Pricing, below).
A plain Mumukshu-status member can only book food if they already have, or are in the process of booking, a room or flat stay covering those dates. This ties food eligibility to having a stay at the centre; without one, the booking is refused.
Staff can book food on anyone's behalf regardless of this rule.

Adding a new meal to a day that already has some meals booked simply adds to it — an existing booking is never reduced by a later one. Removing a meal happens only through cancellation, described below.

Booking and cancellation cutoffs¶

Meals must be booked before 11 AM the day before. The app only lets a member pick dates that respect this: before 11 AM, the earliest bookable day is tomorrow; from 11 AM onward, the earliest becomes the day after tomorrow.
A booked meal can be cancelled up to 8 PM the day before. After that, cancelling that meal is refused.
Staff aren't bound by either cutoff when booking or cancelling on a member's behalf.

Pricing¶

Meals are free for residents, Seva Kutir members, and Mumukshus — no charge is ever created for them.
Guests pay per meal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner each carry a fixed price set by staff (currently ₹60 for breakfast and ₹120 each for lunch and dinner), billed to whoever did the booking on the guest's behalf. A meal that's already been booked for a person isn't charged again if it's booked a second time.
Cancelling a paid guest meal reverses the charge, following the normal refund/credit rules (see Payments, Credits & Reconciliation).
If food is booked as part of a festival package, the days actually inside the festival are covered by the festival's own food arrangement — only the extra days before arrival or after departure are booked and priced as ordinary individual meals.

Reports available to staff¶

Staff can review, for any date range, how many of each meal were booked, how many were actually served, and how many were booked but never picked up (a no-show). The same rollup separates out spice and hightea preferences, and can optionally exclude days covered by a festival package, since those meals belong to the festival rather than to individual bookings. Staff can also drill into who specifically booked or missed a given meal on a given date, and pull a per-person history of booked-versus-served meals over a range of dates.

Known limitations today¶

The 11 AM booking cutoff isn't actually enforced for most bookings — it's only enforced by which dates the app lets a member pick. A booking made through some other path could bypass it.
A guest who books and pays for their own meal isn't reliably refunded if they cancel it. Refunding on cancellation currently only works dependably when someone else made the booking on the guest's behalf.
There's no on-screen way for staff to change meal prices. They exist as fixed values that currently require an engineering change to update.
The two staff-facing cutoffs for group bookings don't match. Creating a group booking for a future date is blocked after 11 AM the day before, but editing one is only blocked after 8 PM the day before — an inconsistency staff should be aware of.

Neither of these is something a member notices day-to-day — they mostly affect how reliably staff tooling and pricing behave behind the scenes. Full engineering detail, and every other known defect, is tracked in the technical reference.