Hi Chaitanya, I read about this 2 weeks back, and I was amazed at the scale they are carrying out this mid-day meal program. Feeding close-to-a-million poor children a good day meal is excellent. This programme made it's way into Harvard Business School's course books, and HBS has introduced a paper for the first year MBA students to teach this as a case study. That's a great honor for Akshayapatra.
I was thinking if it is possible for us to carry out this programme on a small scale in rural schools. Ofcourse I know this is a very premature idea and needs lot of study and effort. Just as a starting point, I just contacted Mr. E Sarath Babu of Foodking Caterers Pvt Ltd and asked him if he can work with us on this kind of programme, since he has catering expertise. Not sure if you all heard about Sarath Babu, but all news papers published about him a while back. I posted on my blog also about him. Here is the link. http://www.sadanapalli.net/blog/2008/05/21/inspirational-a-crorepati-who-lives-in-a-hut. I only contacted him because he also came from a poor background, struggled a lot to reach this stage, and he also has intentions to help the poor. So, I thought that he may respond positively. I will let you all know how my discussion with Sarath goes. Best Regards, Pradeep Sadanapalli www.sadanapalli.net www.tapanafoundation.com ----- Original Message ---- From: Chaitanya Ganesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 10:59:59 PM Subject: [tomakeadifference] Akshayapatra - NGO on Midday meals for children About Akshaya Patra http://www.akshayap atra.org/ The Akshaya Patra Foundation is the largest NGO midday meal program in the world. Akshaya Patra is an organization with the vision that no child shall be deprived of education because of hunger. Now feeding over 960,000 underprivileged children in over 5,700 schools in six states in India, Akshaya Patra will reach its million children milestone fairly soon. It costs only $28 to feed a child for the entire year. Akshaya Patra is a public-private partnership that combines good management, innovative technology and smart engineering to deliver school lunch at a fraction of the cost of similar programs in other parts of the world. For many of the children this is their only complete meal for the day. This gives them an incentive to come to school, stay in school and provides them with the necessary nutrients they need to develop their cognitive abilities to focus on learning. Through kitchens specially designed by engineers to leverage technology and sourcing its food stocks from local markets, Akshaya Patra is able to reduce costs associated with transportation and food spoilage while supporting the local economy. In a short time, the foundation has grown to become the largest, and certainly most innovative, school lunch program in the world. Akshaya Patra is a great example of what a non-profit organization can achieve-- a cost effective, scalable solution with high quality service delivery.
