EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - Global Child Nutrition Foundation

toddlers were underweight. About one third of the world’s 146
million undernourished children live in India, a country whose
GDP growth will push its economy past Great Britain’s in 2020
and Japan’s in 2030.
Finally, the MDMS program must address breakfast
requirements, strengthen the links between the government’s
nutrition and health sectors, work on food-absorption issues such
as safe drinking water and clean toilets and improve levels of
community participation.
Public-private partnerships offer innovative models for the
government to scale up.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation’s vision statement—“No child
in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger”—
explicitly links malnutrition to educational failure. This NGO
considers educational attainment the key both to an improved
personal standard of living that breaks the poverty cycle and to
broader national competitive goals.
Complementing the Indian government’s efforts in school
feeding, Akshaya Patra has developed innovative ways to
prepare fresh food in volume for schoolchildren. For example, in
one of its commercial-scale kitchens, a giant steamer can cook
rice for 1,000 children in 15 minutes, and an automated maker
can turn out 40,000 chapatis an hour. These hot foods are then
delivered throughout an eight-state region by a fleet of trucks.
Its award-winning kitchens feature a creative “three-stage gravityflow
mechanism” to take raw delivered grains and process them
into transportable meals.
Scaling Up Sustainability: Linking School Feeding with Agriculture
Development to Maximize Food Security
May 3-7, 2011
Nairobi, Kenya
© 2011 GCNF and PCD. All rights reserved. Page 20
“In Jaipur, 18% of the children said they would
not have attended school if there were no meals.”
C.P. Das, Akshaya Patra Foundation
Akshaya Patra, which means “inexhaustible vessel” in Sanskrit,
funds its operations through a mix of government per-child
subsidies and contributions from a broad network of partner firms
operating in the country, from Mysore Minerals and Infosys
Technologies to Citigroup and Cisco.
KPMG audits its finances, and A.C. Nielsen tracks its
performance against metrics such as school attendance,
classroom performance, and student nutritional status. Some
before-and-after results:
Location Metric Result
Bangalore 1 st grade enrollment 21%
Bangalore Drop-out rate 8% to 18%
Hubli 5 th grade enrollment 31%
Vrindavan Underweight population 26% to 38%
Although it now feeds almost 1.3 million children in India,
Akshaya Patra’s efforts are dwarfed by the centralized federal
program for 113 million students. Nonetheless, its innovations in
infrastructure, kitchen construction, and distribution provide
prototypes the national government can exploit on a larger scale.