Akshaya Patra Model: Feeding Knowledge Hungry Children
While today, he was ready to serve 1.4 million meals for schoolchildren, Mr.CC Das, Program Director, Akshaya Patra Foundation from Bangalore also faced the challenges 15-years before its establishment like any other start-up. Similar was the case of Mr.Trilok Gautam, Executive Supervisor, who was working in a remote village called Baran in Rajasthan. On his visit during the mid-day meal preparation, he was inspecting the quality of meal, where women were busy in preparing food. They were preparing bread by rolling the dough, while few were chopping vegetables with utmost hygienic care. Cleaner, safer, quality meal was to be prepared and served for 1,500 poor students. These children earlier used to go hungry from the school.
On November 28th 2001, Supreme Court of India gave a verdict and directed the State Government and Union Territories to provide mid-day meal to every child in Government and Government-assisted primary schools. The Right to Food Law emerged as a fundamental right, enforced due to constitutional amendment under Article 32 of the constitution.
Hence, every State Government geared up to make the mid-day meal scheme successful in their respective States. The Karnataka government also participated and named this programme as ‘Akshara Dashoha’.
Government of Karnataka took the pioneering step to involve NGOs like Akshaya Patra as an important partner of the government to run this innovative mid-day meal scheme under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) Model.
Presently, Indian mid-day meal scheme considered as one of the largest mid-day meal programme in the world has a target to reach out nearly 120 million children in the country......................
Mid-Day Meal in India – History
The ideology of mid-day meal has long-standing history in India. Madras corporation area decided to initiate mid-day meal scheme way back in 1925 for the underprivileged poor, landless children from diverse socio-economic background.
Further, in 1928, Keshav Academy of Kolkata started compulsory mid-day tiffin for school students on payment of 25 paise each child per month. Similarly, in 1941 some regions of Kerala also introduced school lunch scheme.............
Worse Score Card
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Germany headquartered firm Welthungerhilfe along with University of California studied and published the World Hunger Index. These organizations have analyzed the hunger on three parameters, which measured child malnutrition rate, mortality rate of children and number of calorie deficient persons in the world..............
Role of Akshaya Patra Foundation
The Akshaya Patra Foundation started its mid-day meal programme in June 2000 by providing free midday meals to 1,500 children in five government schools in Bangalore, Karnataka. Since 2000, the organization has worked towards reaching more children with wholesome food on every single school day.
Today Akshaya Patra feeds free mid-day meals to over 1.4 million school students in 10,661 government schools and aided schools across 10 States in India. Akshaya Patra has also ranked 23rd NGO amongst Top 100 NGOs of the world reported a global journal.............
Growth Model
Akshaya Patra started midday meal catering to 1500 students in five schools in Bangalore. Within six months of starting the program, it had requests from 3,000 schools, Foundation soon scaled up to feed 30,000 children. With government financial support by April 2003, it was feeding 43,000 children daily. With rapid growth in both urban and rural areas, Akshaya Patra foundation had expanded to each day feed 5,67,622 children in 2,000 schools in ten locations in India by March 2007...........
Managing Funds Cost Effectively
Akshaya Patra was funded through a combination of government subsidies and private donations (Exhibit II)............
Locating Perfect
The main backbone system for success of Akshaya Patra foundation is its kitchen. This operates in two modes centralized and decentralized kitchens. While selecting the urban schools the centralized kitchen is more beneficial as delivery of food to these nearby schools become very easy. On the contrary, while selecting the schools in the rural area time and distance play very important role............
Delivering in Time
Various modern Methods like Logistic charting for route optimisation, GPRS to track the location of vehicles for safer and on time delivery are gradually being adopted and implemented by the foundation. It also faced difficulties in the transportation of goods. For example when trained delivery trucks would be blocked in mud in rainy season for up to three days in remote and rural areas..............
A True Learning Organization
Since its early development occurred largely through trial-and-error, a culture of constant improvement and learning was adopted throughout the organization, which affected everything from kitchen design to delivery of service. “Earlier we did try to give them sambhar but the children were unhappy and said dal khatti (sour) ya kharab ho gayi hai; so now dal and kadhi is offered once a week said Mr.Das.............
Blending it Right: Centralized and Decentralized Kitchen Model
Centralized kitchens have the capacity to cook between 50,000 and 1,50,000 meals daily thus it helps achieving economies of scale. Cooking takes place in mechanized steam heated cauldrons that are specially designed to reduce the cooking time. The foundation has its biggest kitchen located in Hubli Dharwad with a capacity to cook for 1,85,000 students in less than five hours..........
Managing Supply Chain
The daily lunch provided by the Foundation include – rice, lentils, vegetables, spices, and curds. The raw materials used for preparing mid-day meal can be classified into subsidized and non-subsidized. Governmentsubsidized food grains such as rice and fortified Atta form the major portion of the meal. Non-subsidized food can further be classified into two types: groceries such as moong dal, oil and vegetables such as tomatoes..............
Technology Food
The kitchen from inside is very gigantic, consist of rice cauldrons(vessels) each of which cooks up to 110 kg of rice in 20 minutes. Similarly, Sambhar cauldrons cook up to 1200 litres of sambhar in two hours. Rice is emptied down from the steam-heated cauldrons for cooking............
Managing Human Resource challenges
Akshaya Patra foundation used to employ self-help group of four to six village women to cook the mid-day meal. Foundation has trained these women about cooking, nutrition, hygiene standards, maintaining accounts, inventory and different activities to empower them. Each village kitchen consists of one head cook on rotation who was responsible for purchasing vegetables, firewood and supervising the daily operations...............
Quality and Nutrition of Mid-Day Meal
Every meal prepared by Akshaya Patra is of 500 calories, whereas nutrition experts recommend more than the 350-400 calories. Quality and safety of the food are the prime requirements at each stage of the Akshaya Patra kitchen. To improve the quality standards, advanced projects like kaizen and 5‘s’ have been undertaken in different locations..............
Extension Services
Foundation conducts various other feeding programmes for Anganwadi children, relief for disaster, feeding the expecting, lactating mothers, and old age homes, runaway, homeless and subsidised lunch for economically backward class of society.............
Mid-Day Meal Little Bus
The blue school buses having pictures of children on it, which moves across 23 locations in 10 states that are donated by different organizations are encouraging the children. It creates assurance of food, Happiness, dream of better future and cherishing moments. These buses carry meals to 1,06,661 schools within the country..............
Footprint and Global Impression
Many researches reflect that mid-day meals help to improve better health among children leading to better cognitive social and emotional development among children. There is significant increase in enrolment and retention of children in school with increased attendance..............
Exhibits
Exhibit I: World Hunger Index - How India Compares
Exhibit II: Government Subsidies