Akshaya Patra initiative aims to feed 5 mn children per year

Madhu Pandit Dasa of the ISKCON movement, awarded the Padma Shri for his mid-day meal service at schools rendered under the Akshaya Patra initiative, says the foundation aims to feed 5 million children by year 2020.
The foundation of Akshaya Patra based on spiritual leader Swami Prabhupada's principle of no child going hungry has taken upon itself the responsibility of providing food to children in schools across different regions of the country.
Dasa who was among the eminent persons who was honoured with the Padma award in a ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan yesterday says, "It feels that our work is being recognized."

"The award is the stamp of the government that it cares for this service. We want to feed at least 5 million children by 2020, which means every two to three months we have to open a kitchen that will feed at least one and a half lakh children regularly," he says.
What began in 1998 as an initiative to feed about 1500 children in Bengaluru, has now taken shape of a nation-wide mission that serves wholesome food to over 1.4 million under privileged children from 10,661 schools across 10 states in India.
"Once we started with 1500 children in Bangalore, the word spread around that Bengaluru Iskcon Temple is feeding in schools and suddenly applications for nearly 1,50,000 children came in. That is when we realized that so many children are sitting in the school hungry," says Dasa.

To accomplish the daunting tasks of preparing and delivering food in such massive quantities, Dasa, an IIT and IIM graduate, suggested the use of technology and thus were born the 'mega kitchens' that churn out unfathomable volumes of food in no time.

"Because it is a big scale problem, we thought that the only way to do that was through technology. That is how we came up with the mega kitchen. We have to use the best of the technologies because we have to cook for lakhs of children and it cannot be done without technology," says Dasa.
While the foundation functioned in the southern region on

its own for about 5 years, its efforts were recognized and the government's ministry of Human Resource Development soon entered into a Public Private Partnership (PPP) programme in education and child welfare sectors.
"It is a Public Private Partnership where the government is also funding by giving grains and we are also raising funds, from both individual and corporate donors. When we started in 1998, the government did not have hot mid-day meals. It was only since 2003 that it started subsidization.
"Government is putting so much money every year for education, free books and uniforms. All this will become useless if the child is sitting hungry at school. This is a very strategic intervention which will give value to the taxpayers' money that is spent on these children," says Dasa.

According to the study conducted by the foundation to map the impact of the programme, Dasa says, "We found that the retention of the students increased and both enrollment and classroom performance also improved according to the teachers."
To gather impact of the programme and eliminate any possibilities of corruption in the process, the Akshaya Patra team maintains a teacher-student register documenting their grievances, besides the inspection teams conducting surprise visits.
"There have been times when we have come across deficiencies. We see them and rectify them," Dasa says.
Owing to the premium technology that is used to meet the challenging demands, establishing a mega kitchen is conspicuously overwhelmingly expensive. Although major part of these expenses are taken care of by donations offered by companies as part of their corporate social responsibilities (CSR), Dasa insists that it is imperative that the government increases its funding for the project on an annual basis.

"One mega kitchen cost about Rs 20 crores. In the last four to five years, corporate social responsibility has come as a saving grace for us. Akshaya Patra is a very comfortable platform for their spending towards CSR, because of the accountability and the professional way in which it is done," Dasa says.