The one thing all 7 billion of us – regardless of all our differences – have in common is our home. We all share a little bit of space on this planet Earth, so it’s important that we work together to preserve it. That’s why the theme for World Environment Day 2015 as chosen by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is ‘Seven Billion Dreams. One Planet. Consume with Care.’

Each of our actions on an individual, organisational and community level, impact the environment in some way, and it is up to us to choose whether this will be positive or negative. At Akshaya Patra we have chosen to adopt environment friendly methods of running our mid-day meal programme.

One of our big initiatives in ensuring green practices is the implementation of a solar plant at our Vasanthapura kitchen in Bengaluru. This plant has the capacity to produce 70 units of power a day, and is used to run all the applications in the kitchen that work on single phase power like the computers, fans and other systems.

The plant runs through the use of photovoltaic (PV) cells which convert sunlight to direct current electricity through the course of the day. Using the power of these cells the plant has the ability to run till 4 am. With basic maintenance on a yearly basis, the plant has the capacity to provide environment friendly, reliable energy to the kitchen for decades. Through this plant, Akshaya Patra has reduced its dependence on non-renewable sources of energy to function.

Besides choosing to adopt solar power, there are so many other ways to reduce our negative impact on the environment. Some of the alternative methods we’ve adopted at Akshaya Patra are implementing effluent treatment plants, reducing our carbon emissions by optimising our meal delivery routes and installing BioUrja plants to utilise waste for energy.

Akshaya Patra is also adopting ISO 14001 standards of implementing its Environment Management System (EMS) in the Hubballi, Ballari, HK Hill and Vasanthapura kitchens in Karnataka. ISO is an international organisation for standardisation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. We aim to receive ISO certification for the EMS programmes in the four locations in the coming months.

Cheryl Rebello, CEO of the CherYsh Trust has a dream. She wants to help people from rural areas achieve self-sustainability through the women in their region. To make this happen, Cheryl has partnered with several NGOs, colleges, local businesses and hotels. The CherYsh Trust joined forces with Akshaya Patra when working to foster indigenous development through the community kitchens at Haliyal.

Akshaya Patra along with other hotels in the area requires indigenous recipes, especially big quantities of sambar powder while cooking the mid-day meal. The ladies benefitting from Cheryl’s programme rose to the task, providing Akshaya Patra with 100 kilograms of sambar powder in a short span of 10 days. To make sure the powder matched Akshaya Patra’s high standards, it was put through stringent quality tests and scored high on nearly every parameter. According to Cheryl this was a proud moment for them all when she broke the good news to the ladies. “Now it was no longer subjective or charity. It was about quality,” she said.

The programme is now looking to scale up operations at the community kitchen. To raise funds for this, Shantha Pedru Dodmani from Tatwangi village in Haliyal taluk ran the TCS World 10k marathon in Bangalore recently. Explaining the impact the kitchen has had on the local community, Shantha described it as a “transformation”. The kitchen has helped create employment and foster development in the region, and also provided women with the confidence to be entrepreneurs.

Training sessions are provided to these women in collaboration with Hotel Gateway-Lakeside and Akshaya Patra. These sessions address topics like personal and cooking hygiene, efficient cooking methods and learning local recipes. According to Cheryl, these sessions have helped the ladies rise to the challenge and raise their expectations too.

Akshaya Patra is very proud to have the opportunity to partner with the CherYsh Trust to help support and guide local communities so they can develop into self-sustaining societies.