Jagranjan Mishra, General Manager (Operations) at the Foundation’s Ahmedabad kitchen | Dinesh Shukla

The sun is barely up but Akshaya Patra’s kitchen at Ahmedabad is bustling with activity.

“With a capacity to produce 200,000 meals in five hours, the Ahmedabad kitchen is one of the largest cooking facilities in India,” says Jagranjan Mishra, General Manager of Operations at The Akshaya Patra Foundation. “It is certainly the largest kitchen dedicated to the Mid-day Meal Scheme, a programme by the Government of India that supplies free lunches on working days for children in schools to improve the nutritional health of school-going kids in India,” he explains.

Already tonnes of wheat flour are being loaded onto the roti-making machine to go through a sheeter and roller that controls the gauge of the dough. The dough is then cut by a die to make flat rounds which go via the conveyor to the baking oven before emerging as a roti (Indian flat bread). The machine can turn out 60,000 rotis in an hour!

Since Akshaya Patra is one of the major providers of these mid-day meals, much research and innovative thinking has gone into automating the kitchens, thereby ensuring high production and hygiene in the cooking process.

“Our recently built Ahmedabad kitchen supplies about 130,000 lunches to around 526 schools in seven talukas of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar districts. The daily challenge is to ensure the freshly cooked meals can reach the schools within the minimum cooking-to-consumption time. For this, some technologies used in manufacturing industries have been adapted to the kitchen, perhaps for the first time”, Jagranjan adds.

The roti-making machine was incorporated into the cooking infrastructure to appeal to the palettes of the children from North India. This was done to help optimise nutrition and consumption of the mid-day meal among the students all over the country.

“At Gandhinagar apart from the 60,000 rotis per hour machine, we have a standby machine that can take over if needed. In Gujarat the set lunch menu also includes local favourites like dal dhokli, thepla or sukdi (Indian savoury dishes), and a jaggery based sweet dish apart from the staples of roti with sabzi (vegetable) or dal (lentils) and rice,” he says.

Mishra says Akshaya Patra came to Gujarat after Narendra Modi visited their Bangalore facility in 2007. They started kitchens to provide mid-day meals to schools at Gandhinagar, Vadodara and Surat. “We got good support from the CSR (corporate social responsibility) wings of PSUs (public service undertakings) like ONGC, GSPC, GACL and GIPC and local donors,” he says. “In Surat, apart from schools we have also taken up Integrated Child Development Scheme’s in Anganwadis. In 2014, we shifted from the rented premises in Gandhinagar to set up this kitchen on a two-acre plot in Ahmedabad.”

In the kitchen the roti-making machine is the center piece on the ground floor. Upstairs, there are cauldrons and tanks for making dal, vegetables and other foods, while the top floor is the pre-process area where sorting and cutting takes place.

“This is perhaps the first time in India that the gravity flow process previously used for factory materials has been adapted to a kitchen,” Mishra says. “All the machines are linked to conveyors and chutes that channel the prepared food down to the ground floor without any human handling. They are loaded onto vehicles that are customised to hold vessels upright in a honeycomb structure and designed for minimal temperature loss between leaving the kitchen and reaching the school.”

This highly mechanised, streamlined kitchen has certainly met the mark, as Mishra agrees saying their audits show students are getting their meals on time and are happy with their lunches.

– By Anil Mulchandani

Source: http://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/A-Moveable-Feast-Across-Gujarat-Schools/2014/09/28/article2450929.ece

About 40 per cent of fresh fruit and vegetable produce in India spoils before it even reaches consumers. This produce has to pass hands, surviving several levels of negotiation, and travel long distances to finally make it to the retailers. After all this, despite the thousands of tonnes of food already lost before we even see it, food wastage in India is a huge problem.

In the modern, plentiful world of the average middle class family, excessive buying has become almost compulsive. What cannot be consumed can be discarded, after all what’s a little food wasted? Unfortunately, it’s millions of people with this thought that has brought India to the crisis point it’s at today.

But this indiscriminate food wastage directly takes away from someone else’s sustenance. In reality every third of the world’s malnourished children comes from India. Children stay poor, illiterate, weak and unhealthy because they have no access to the nutrition they need to thrive. With so much starvation all around the country, it’s time to take stock of the situation and take immediate steps to remedy it. And in order to solve the problem, we need to first understand it.

Food wastage can happen at various stages. Poor agricultural practices lead to pest infestation and loss of crop, while climatic fluctuations can damage the harvest as well. During packing and storage, India especially suffers significantly. In fact food worth Rs. 44,000 crore a year is wasted in India due to poor storage infrastructure. Once the remaining food produce reaches the market, huge quantities are wasted in the day-to-day lives of the affluent. Cultural customs and gatherings like weddings, meetings and business conferences dictate mammoth quantities of food, much of which is wasted.

While several of these factors are beyond the control of the common man, it is vital that we each do our bit to reduce food wastage in India. Some simple practices that can contribute to solving India’s food wastage problem are:

• Maintain well-functioning food storage facilities in your home
• Purchase and cook only as much as you need
• Donate any excess food to those in need

These measures will ensure more food for young children in need. By making food more accessible to children they will grow healthier and have the opportunity to focus on their education. Let’s break their cycle of hunger and poverty by stopping food wastage. Together we can #EndClassroomHunger in India.