A young executive in a plush office at Nariman Point, Mumbai, furiously jabs away at his mouse. Merely by lifting a finger -- contributing neither money nor food -- he has been getting sustenance across to the world's poor. Click by painful click.

But he'll have to hurry. In a few seconds -- 3.6 to be precise -- the child will shrink to a statistic among the nearly 18,000 children under five who anually succumb to starvation world-wide. Unknown to each other, and completely anonymous is a growing band of food aid `workers' keeping the dying alive. All it takes is the touch of a button that says `Donate Free Food' at www.thehungersite.com, launched in June this year by people who have chosen to keep their identities undercover. With every successive click, a morsel is added to a virtual food basket that feeds the United Nation's reserves for the malnourished. Certified by the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN programme, the site thus bridges virtual donors with the very real malnourished.

This is how the food chain works: At every click of the `Donate Free Food' button, food worth 50 cents (around a quarter cup of grain) is added to the WFP's food reserves - not by you, but a corporate sponsor. The sponsor cannot get the aid across unless someone clicks on the `Donate Free Food' button. The quid pro quo? A public relations platform for the sponsor; the satisfaction of feeding the starving for the net user.

With the money so pledged, the WFP then selects food appropriate to the various regions afflicted by malnutrition before distributing it world-wide. Sponsors have thus far pledged cash donations equivalent to more than a million servings of food since the site opened in June.

Currently operating with nine sponsors -all American - the Hunger Site needs many more sponsors to help provide the poor with basic nutrition. Food reserves, like the beneficiaries, are highly perishable. Still, despair is many a morsel away: The number of times the `Donate Free Food' button was clicked rose from 1,72,739 in June to over seven times in July. The site has also been gaining popularity in India, where the number of virtual donors rose to over 10,000 in three months.

In a country like India, which witnesses hunger deaths every year, this programme could bring about much needed relief. According to an estimate in '87, there were around 312 million people in India below the poverty line - which translates to 39 per cent of the population - and most of them landless labourers. Till about two years ago, most of these labourers did not earn more than Rs 15-17 per day, which barely helped them scrape through. Maharashtra, one of the richest states in India, still has starvation deaths in places like Thane, only miles away fromMumbai.

However, as of now, not even one tenth of net users in India, as elsewhere in the world, are aware of this programme, informes the website. According to those who run the site, if even a fraction of the people using the net took the trouble to click the button every day, world hunger could be reduced to the barest minimum.

To the privileged Net surfer, it's a mechanical motor movement. To one of the 24,000 persons dying of starvation every day, that finger click could make the difference between life and death.

Persons wishing to donate can access www.thehungersite.com or contact The Hunger Site at PO Box: 3520 Bloomington, IN 47402 USA.

HOW TO SPONSOR

Sponsors are given an advertising space on the Hunger Site in return for the donations they will make. Every time a person clicks on the donate free food sign, each company has to pay 50 cents. The sponsors are evenly distributed. The site's aim is to provide one person with a total of 2 1/4 cups of rice or wheat or any othergrain every day. The number of hits on the site are calculated and at the end of the day, the company is sent a billing statement showing the total number of donations for the day that they have sponsored. The company then writes a cheque for the amount directly to the UN. The total donation per day per company comes to anything between $ 350-500 with a maximum limit of $ 750. The minimum time a company can advertise on the site is one day.