Paper short abstract:

To understand the impact of COVID-19 on the food security at household level in urban & peri-urban environments, a mobile phone survey was conducted & the insights reflected changing food environments and critical challenges were literacy levels, gender differences & time for responding remotely.

Paper long abstract:

Food systems, food security and nutrition during the pandemic were affected due to internal and external environmental and political dynamics. To understand the impact of COVID-19 on food security at the household and individual level, remote data collection using mobile phone was carried out in the selected locations of urban and peri-urban regions of Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The mobile interviews by the trained enumerators was undertaken in local language and verbal audio consent was taken with due diligence before the onset of the interview. The data entry was done using the free online KoBo collect survey tool to go through the survey and immediately enter the data so that the database is created in real time. The critical challenges and gaps identified were: the survey form was kept short but the actual interviews were longer thereby resulting in respondent and interviewer fatigue. There were lot of passive refusals as the lower income category respondents were stressed out due to lack of employment and loss of jobs especially people worked in unorganized sectors during the pandemic. It was noted that some respondents who cooperated in the beginning of the interview and agreed to participate in the survey failed to complete the survey because of their inability to comprehend the survey questions because of low education levels. Women rarely participated in the survey due to lack of accessibility to own mobile phones and were restricted to participate in the presence of the male members in the household.