Akshaya Patra hungers for eliminating starvation

Tuesday 14th March 2017 18:08 EDT
 
 

The first aspect of existence is food as it is the most fundamental spiritual stuff that goes in every one’s life. But not every child in India is privileged enough to enjoy a good square meal.

According to 2011 Census, India’s child population is 472 million. But almost half this population is malnourished (48%), slowing down growth and obstructing the ability to learn. These children face the double whammy of “no food, no education”.

However, Akshaya Patra Foundation’s massive food programme is bridging the gap between hunger and education. With innovative ideas, smart scaling up and cutting edge technology, Akshaya Patra is addressing childhood hunger and malnutrition by working to promote education for underserved children in India. The whole idea is to attract and retain children in schools and get full value of their classroom experience.

A not-for-profit organisation based out of Bengaluru, India, Akshaya Patra provides food to government and government-aided schools.

In India 120 million children are in government schools. The mega kichens of Akshaya Patra are building future generations by serving unlimited nutritious meal to 1.6 million children every afternoon. They have already crossed 2 billion meals in the last 17 years.

In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, Akshaya Patra alludes to an inexhaustible vessel of food.

What began as a dream in the year 2000 has today become a movement. Akshaya Patra is not only feeding thousands of underprivileged schoolchildren across India everyday but also giving them an opportunity to dream.

In an exclusive chat with L. George, CEO, ABPL – Shridhar Venkat, CEO, Akshaya Patra Foundation,and Bhawani Singh Shekhawat, CEO, Akshaya Patra Foundation UK, gave some food for thought about their vision of eliminating classroom hunger.

 

Shridhar, how did Askhaya Patra start?

Well, Akshaya Patra effort started in Bangalore in 2000 with a very lofty vision that no child in India will be deprived of education because of hunger. We started feeding five Government schools (1,500 children) in Bangalore. The news started spreading to other schools and we found there was a request for feeding 100,000 children in Bangalore. That gave us an insight that we should leverage technology to solve this problem. And that’s how we set up India’s first centralised kitchen infrastructure in the NGO sector to feed children. Our kitchens typically have a capacity to prepare 50,000 to 100,000 meals a day. So in just 6 hours 100,000 children will get fed from one kitchen.

Shridhar, how you got involved in Akshaya Patra?

I used to be a volunteer with Akshaya Patra. I am here for the last 11 years. I used to work for corporates like Philips, Cisco WebEx. I was on a job transition to take over as CEO of a company. At that time I was staying in the guest house of Akshaya Patra Foundation. Madhu Pandit Dasa, the chairman of the Akshaya Patra Foundation, called me. A graduate from IIT-Powai (Mumbai), Madhuji said ‘Sreedhar, why are you building empires for others? Do it for these poverty-stricken children who are the future of India.’ That was the turning point. I dumped the company which I was supposed to join and decided to do something for the children of India. While I did well in corporates, I was basically looking for existential purpose in life. And Akshaya Patra was the perfect calling or platform from where I could get the purpose of my life.

Why Akshaya Patra started in Bangalore, not in any other city?

You know the visionary seed of Akshaya Patra is spiritual. It has come from one of the foremost spiritual masters of the world – Swami Prabhupada, the founder of International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Long ago Swamiji was in a temple at Mayapur near Kolkata. There was a big feast in the temple where food is served in plantain leaves. So after the feast he was resting in his apartment and suddenly he heard cries of children. And when he opened the window, much to his dismay, he saw children fighting with stray dogs for scraps of leftover food. Tears rolled down from his eyes and he said ‘where our Supreme Father (Lord Krishna) is there children should not go hungry’. He gave a mandate that within the 10-mile radius of a temple nobody should go hungry. He had a temple (Radha Krishna Temple built by Iskcon) in Bangalore 30 years later. His disciples built it. And they took forward this idea and that’s how Akshaya Patra came into existence. We incorporated it as a secular foundation. And that’s how government came forward and supported us.

What impact Akshaya Patra had on society?

Akshaya Patra is addressing the fundamental problem of classroom hunger. Parents who cannot afford a good meal for the child, they won’t send the child to school. So food becomes a big incentive for these children to come to school. We serve unlimited food. That’s the first attraction. That is Akshaya Patra draws a child to the school. The second is – as we serve nutrious hot meals every day, the schoolchildren’s power of thinking, attention span, scholastic performance go up. The impact of Akshaya Patra has been phenomenal. We have excellent cases of children becoming doctors, engineers, sub-inspectors, many of them even teaching in the same school. Akshaya Patra has created a model how government, public and a not-for-profit can come together and work for the society. The single biggest problem this great nation faces is hunger. 30% of world’s malnourished children are in India. So our idea is to stay focussed on this problem. 

Would you like to add to it, Bhawani?

Well, a challenge is really worth taking when one initiative addresses multiple problems. By just serving food – teachers come to school, children attend school. It also takes away some burden from the government. It allows many activities to come together which otherwise would have had to be addressed separately.

How challenging was it to set up a mega kitchen like this and how this centralised operation works?

Shridhar: If you get a good philanthropic supporter, a kitchen with a capacity to prepare 100,000 meals a day will cost about 2 million pounds. If we get a good supporter and a running expenditure visibility for next 3 years, we set up a kitchen.

Cooking rice, sambar, daal or khichdi for 100,000 beneficiaries a day is not easy. So, we rely on technology. We started using industrial steam for cooking rice. In North India, children don’t eat rice so much, they want rotis, so we worked with a papad manufacturing guy and created a machine which can make 40,000 rotis per hour. 

How do you go about choosing the various places? How do you encourage the children and choose the schools?

Bhawani: See this is a public-private partnership. In Bangalore we started on our own. But after that, many other state governments started inviting us. The government will give a list of schools to be fed. We sign a MoU with them and identify a location with the help of government to set up the kitchen. Typically a 100,000-capacity kitchen will need about 3 acres of land. Many a time the government comes forward and gives us or we take it on lease.

Where all Akshaya Patra is active and what are the projects in the pipeline?

Shridhar: We are currently in 11 states and 27 locations. We are in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Odisha, Chattisgarh, Assam, UP, Rajasthan, Gujarat, etc. Of the 27 locations, 2 are decentralised. Currently we are catering to 1.6 million children over 13,000 schools. India has about 1.2 million government schools. For upcoming projects we have signed up with the UP government for 8 new kitchens. We also got invited by Jharkhand government for 3 new kitchens. Maharashtra government too is keen. In Rajasthan we are experimenting with 25,000 to 30,000-capacity kitchens. Altogether we have about 50 new kitchens in the pipeline in the next 3 years.

Are there any specific projects that cater to Gujarat and Punjab?

In Gujarat we are setting up a new kitchen in Jamnagar, Bhavnagar and Bhuj. We are open to setting up kitchens in Porbander and Rajkot if we get supporters. We already have kitchens in Vadodara, Surat and Ahmedabad in Gujarat, while in Rajasthan we have kitchens in Udaipur, Jaipur, Nathdwara and Ajmer. In Punjab we are open to starting up in Chandigarh and Amritsar. Talks are already going on in this regard.

What’s your role as CEO of Akshaya Patra in India?

Akshaya Patra has got about 6,000 people working in 27 different locations. Our head office is inBangalore. Besides solving problems, a typical day revolves around empowering my team. I also look into Akshaya Patra’s biggest challenge – sustainability. We have a new initiative called the Akshaya Nidhi where we use the existing capacity of Akshaya Patra to feed the bottom of the pyramid. We are going to feed 40,000 municipal workers who clean the roads, all for a small profit. And when we make small profit, the Akshaya Patra children will get benefit. I spend time on building that up. We have already got funding from Ratan Tata from the Jamshedji Tata Trust to scaling this venture. I visit schools, meet workers and staff mainly to keep them motivated.

What’s the biggest challenge you have faced hitherto?

When we started this programme in Lucknow, the very first day 30 children were admitted to hospital. We were serving milk. We were really worried. Our kitchens are ISO certified. So we were wondering how come this has happened? Next day the newspaper had headlines – “30 children admitted to hospital after eating Akshaya Patra meal”. When we investigated we found out that these children had never had milk in their life. So it reacted on them. It was not the fault of Akshaya Patra. These children were having allergies, because they never had milk. So these are some of the challenges we have. Keeping the food fresh, nutritious, and serving on time is a big challenge, besides making sure the kitchen runs everyday without fail.

Where do you see Akshaya Patra 5 years down the line in India?

We took about 12 years to feed the first billion meals, cumulatively. We took four more years to serve the second billion meals. In the next 5 years my goal is to see if we can do feed cumulatively 5 billion meals.

What’s the mission of your UK visit?

The main aim is to build awareness. The second is to build advocacy for this programme. We intend to meet the supporters mainly to let them know how innovatively we run this programme and how can we jointly address this problem.

Do you have any suggestions for other charities?

Build trust and be sincere – money will come. Second is scale. I would encourage charities to scale up and run them professionally. The idea is if we can blend the missionary spirit of the not-for-profit and professionalism of the corporate, then you are here to stay.

Bhawani, what’s your take on it?

Well, the world of charity needs to do bit more than feeling good and doing good. So as much as the charity sector could take a leaf out of the corporate sector, it also needs to act even more honestly, responsibly and professionally and if you do that I tell you there are enough forces in the world that will collaborate to help you solve the problem. For this you need the heart of service and mind of a corporate. You need financial integrity. There is also the commitment to growing the organisation. The reason we are building the initiative of Akshaya Nidhi is primarily to support Akshaya Patra.

Shridhar: In Akshaya Patra we have taken an audacious goal of solving this problem by 2040 by which there won’t be a hungry child who misses out school because of not getting a meal. For every pound that we get from the donor, 92% goes into the programme. Only 8 per cent is our administrative cost.

How has UK contributed to the efforts of Akshaya Patra?

Bhawani: The UK office started out predominantly as a fundraising outpost for Akshaya Patra. Our primary objective for long was to mobilise support, channelise funds and direct those funds into Indiatowards the programme. We have had a step change in that strategy. We want to build significantly strong advocacy platforms for Akshaya Patra. We want the world not just to get involved with Akshaya Patra but also to utilise its resources, capabilities and learnings. Whether that means using the platforms, skill and knowledge base of Akshaya Patra to work with large organisations in the world, whether it is working with governments or working with children who go to university who need a transformation purpose. Another thing is how do we leverage our mission and ambitions of Akshaya Nidhi to be able to support the cause of Akshaya Patra? We are also looking at the possibility of creating a service programme in the local community areas where we operate. So we are interested in actually starting a feeding programme in theUK.

Is Akshaya Patra doing any such feeding programme in the UK?

India may be one of the fastest growing economies in the world but it also has the hunger problem. So the challenge is to resolve this paradox. And the paradox is how do you grow the country as well as solve the problem that comes as part of this growth. In the UK there is homelessness, malnutrition, a large number of students are missing meals at schools, a large number of students go to school hungry – the problem is the same, so what we are intending to do here is create awareness about this to begin with by local partners and advocacy platforms, including universities and youth ambassadors at high school levels. Media and government will do its job. But at the grassroots level how do we hold the local community in solving this problem? Right now we are starting a pilot where we are starting a feeding programme collaborating with another group and our intent is to give them the scale and the know-how so that together we can actually start a tangible initiative in the UK which we can grow and scale. It is a trisector model – the government, individuals and institutions cannot solve every problem, but the problem impacts all the three.

Would you encourage partnering with other charities?

Absolutely. I think the DNA of Akshaya Patra is collaboration over competition. We don’t compete with anyone and we are open to collaboration with everyone. The fundamental of our model is around the trisector philosophy. Of course, provided our philosophies match, provided we are only committed to actually doing what we are committed to do, we are open to collaborating with anyone. 

How can the UK audience support you?

Engage, talk, get in touch with us and get the communities engaged with us. Own a part of our problem. We are trying to solve the problem, but we cannot solve it without the help and support of the community. 


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