“I have known Sri Madhu Pandit Dasa and the Akshaya Patra Foundation for the past eight years and seen him build the program from a humble beginning of feeding 1500 children in government schools coming from underprivileged families to its present staggering size and scale of feeding 973,000 children every day in 14 locations in India!!
I have had the opportunity of closely observing the program from the very early days when I too served on the Advisory Board of Akshaya Patra for a couple of year. Sri Madhu Pandit Dasathrough the Akshaya Patra model has revolutionized the concept of cooked mid- day mealprograms that has in a sense, affected the policy and methodology of conduct of mid-day meal programs in the entire county. He started Akshaya Patra cooked mid-day meal program in Bangalore in June 2000, when the program of the state government was only distributing dry rations of 3 kgs of rice per child per month. He introduced sumptuous cooked meal program and it was highly appreciated by the children and schools teachers. The impact was quickly visible children who were enrolled in schools but were not attending started showing up in the schools lured by the hot meals.
Teachers reported that the children’s attention and interest level in the class rooms had improved. The second important contribution of Sri Madhu Pandit Dasa is his design of the mechanized kitchen model. Being an engineer himself, he immediately used industrial design principles of building the kitchens. He used industrial steam boilers, large stainless steel cauldrons for cooking rice and soup, use of conveyor systems to handle cooked materials, custom-designed vehicle to transport food in hot condition, etc. These kitchens were designed to cook native Indian meals that children are naturally used to.
As Akshaya Patra has expanded to different locations in India, the kitchens have been designed to cook different menus of different parts of India which has increased the acceptability of the meal. The significant contribution of the Sri Madhu Pandit Dasa is to carry out this program on a grand scale, as scale is critical in a country like India. The initial designed he planned was to feed 30,000 children! Eight years back it was unimaginable!! The biggest canteens of the Indian Army cooked about 5000 meals at a time.
Now Akshaya Patra kitchens have evolved ever more in their design and innovation and they are usually designed and built to cook about 100,000 meals and more. Such large scale cooking also brought the advantages of the economy of scale and brought down the cost of meal. Today Akshaya Patra has a readily replicable standardized model to cook 100,000 meals and more. The fourth important contribution of Sri Madhu Pandit Dasa is his confidence and organizing ability to take on such large projects of feeding and sustaining it with continuous financial support. When he started feeding 30,000 children in November 2000, there was no support from the government. He has the confidence to go to people and tell them about the importance of feeding children and raise money.
Today the Foundation receives partial support from the government for running expenditure. Nevertheless the Foundation has to raise money to meet the balance of the cost of meal and capital expenditure to set up the large industrial kitchens. For instance when to arrange at least Rs. 2 million (US$41,000) per schools working day (over and above the subsides given by the government) from private donors! Yet another contribution of the Akshaya Patra Foundation is that it has demonstrated how an NGO can function and operate on large scale in multiple locations like for profit enterprises to do. This is an inspiration for other NGO’s and development workers too that development work can be conceived and executed on such a large scale.
During the years 2001-03, we conducted a three year impact assessment study of the mid- day meal provided by Akshaya Patra on nutritional status, schools health and classroom performance of students. The results showed a positive improvement on all these parameters as well as attendance.
Today Akshaya Patra has become a case study of Harvard Business School and regularly discussed by professionals and analyzed by B-schools students and faculty as a model of operational management. Supply chain and logistics management.
Food safety systems management, marketing and communications in a development sector, corporate governance for non-profits and so on. We wish a very bright future for Akshaya Patra and Sri Madhu Pandit Dasa’s team.”
