The Lunch Bell project, a platform-based meal delivery initiative launched in March 2024 by Kudumbashree, a women-led community network in Kerala, India, exemplifies a state-assisted curation of the digital solidarity economy. Emerging against the gendered paradox – where women dominate unpaid domestic cooking yet remain excluded from commercial food entrepreneurship – the project redefines extractive logics of labour organisation within the digital economy. Through qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviews, analysis of policy documents, responses obtained via India’s Right to Information Act, and a walkthrough method examining Kudumbashree’s Pocket Mart mobile app, conducted between March and August 2024, our paper explores how state support for women-centred digital platforms fosters principles of feminist economics, gender justice, and sustainability in the digital solidarity economy. We argue that although the Lunch Bell project operates within an "invited space" for participation shaped by top-down design logics of the state, it nonetheless embodied a reflexive, non-gender-agnostic approach in addressing the concerns of gendered labour, demonstrating the potential of state support for a digital solidarity economy.
Thuppilikkat et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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