AKSHAYA PATRA

Akshaya Patra Foundation is a not-for-profit organization providing freshly cooked, hot and nutritious cooked classroom lunches for nearly 1.3 million underprivileged children in India. It is a Non-Governmental Organization in India. It runs the world’s largest NGO midday meal program for underprivileged school children in India.

HISTORY

The Foundation was started in 2000 feeding 1500 children in schools in Bangalore. Today it has grown into a huge organization. The current Chairman, Madhu Pandit Das is an IIT engineer turned social entrepreneur. The Sanskrit word Akshaya Patra means abundant, inexhaustible bowl of food), and it has its origin in the Hindu epic Mahabharata.

In June 2000, Akshaya Patra started feeding 1500 children in 5 schools in Bangalore. At that time there was no State run school meal program in Karnataka. Within just 10 years of its inception, Akshaya Patra today feeds nearly 1.3 million children in 8 states from 18 kitchens all over India.

A public-private partnership project, Akshaya Patra is a secular program that claims to combine good management, innovative technology and smart engineering to deliver school lunch at a fraction of the cost of similar programs in other parts of the world.

Mission and objectives

In India, lack of food poses significant challenge to the education of the underprivileged children. There are approximately 13.5 million underprivileged children who are out of school and into child labour in order to earn a single meal in a day.Without proper education, these children often grow into adulthood without the competitive edge of their educated peers, and they are often trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty.

The main objective of Akshaya Patra's Mid-Day Meal Scheme is to help underprivileged children by providing them with a healthy, balanced meal that they would otherwise have to work for. The meal is an incentive for them to continue their education. It helps reduce the dropout rate to an enormous extent and increases classroom attendance.
Other objectives include improve socialization among castes, address malnutrition and empower women through employment.

Operations

With an average government subsidy of 50 percent, $23 can feed two children for a year. For many of the children in India, this is their only complete meal for the day. This gives them an incentive to come to school, stay in school and provides them with the necessary nutrients they need to develop their cognitive abilities to focus on learning.

Akshaya Patra caters to the children according to their taste and so the menu is decided keeping the child's tastes and nutrition in mind.
Akshaya Patra kitchens in 18 locations are of two types: Centralized kitchens and Decentralized kitchens

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