It’s a long way from the sandwiches and sushi of an Australian tuck-shop.
At 3am, as the city of Bangalore sleeps, a team is hard at work preparing lunches for 100,000 kids.
In their mega-kitchen, there’s not a roll of Gladwrap in sight.
It’s a military style operation requiring hundreds of workers and thousands of kilos of rice, vegetables and lentils.
The food is cooked in 14 giant stainless steel cauldrons before being packed into heat-insulated trucks and driven to schools in the area.
Madhu Pandit Dasa initiated the Akshaya Patra program 16 years ago.
“The vision of Akshaya Patra is to see that no child goes hungry in this country, especially children who are in government schools,” Mr Dasa said.
“We started with 1500 children and with the Lord’s grace it just exploded with time into such a big program.”
Mr Dasa is also the temple president of ISKCON Bangalore – the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
The Akshaya Patra program
The Akshaya program has 23 kitchens across 10 Indian states.
Every school day, with government and philanthropic support, it feeds a total of 1.5 million children.
The menu varies across the country. In the north, for example, children prefer to eat bread rather than rice so Akshaya Patra has developed a machine that can produce 40,000 rotis in one hour.
Mr Dasa is a trained engineer and drew upon this knowledge to develop machines that allow for large-scale food production.
“One of the reasons we could do this is because we leveraged technology,” Mr Dasa said.
He and other devotees of Lord Krishna have much experience cooking for thousands of people at their temples.
In order to expand the Akshaya Patra program they also harnessed talent from India’s top technology companies like Infosys – it’s where compassion meets corporate efficiency.
They’ve focused on innovation and logistics to develop the world’s largest tuck-shop.
Time management at Akshaya Patra is a key issue and has been the subject of study at Harvard University.
The trucks are loaded and ready by 8am every morning, but before they reach the schools, a sample from every batch of food is tested at a laboratory to ensure it’s safe.
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School lunches
In 2013 more than 20 children died in the Indian state of Bihar after eating contaminated food for lunch.
Akshaya Patra is determined the students it serves will never eat contaminated food.
The Government Higher Primary School in the Bangalore suburb of Yeshwanthpur has been receiving food from Akshaya Patra for the past 12 years.
When the bell rings for lunch, the students line up in a dirt quadrangle to be served rice and sambar – a mix of lentils, vegetables and spices. The children are from underprivileged families; most of the younger students wear no shoes and some are visibly undernourished.
Kavitha M.G., who has taught at the school for five years, said: “The food we are getting from Akshaya Patra is very good and clean and tasty.”
She said most of the children do not have breakfast before they come to school.
“Almost all the children are coming for this purpose only – for food,” she said.
Akshaya Patra provides an inexhaustible bowl of food for students that are allowed as many servings as they like, as long as they finish what’s on their plate.
An AC Nielsen study that measured the impact of the program found it had contributed to increased enrolments, reduced student drop out rate and improved the performance of students in class.
Fighting hunger in India
Despite India’s growing economic clout, millions of children remain undernourished.
In 2001, the Supreme Court issued a directive stating that all primary students at government and government-assisted schools would receive a cooked midday meal.
Approximately 120 million children are eligible for the program but the quality of the meals, delivered by a range of non-government organisations, varies widely.
Akshaya Patra wants to share its knowledge and technology with these groups.
It also wants to expand its own program and aims to be feeding 5 million children by 2020.
