Akshaya Patra serving the Billionth Meal to School Children

The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a Non-Governmental Organization that provides mid-day meal to Government school and Government aided schools across 9 states in India. It operates in 19 locations and reaches out to 1.3 million children everyday. With the vision of “No child in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger”, the Foundation aims to reach 5 million by 2020. Recently, Akshaya Patra
celebrated the success of serving the billionth meal in August 2012. But, reaching this milestone was not an easy task. It required enormous effort, dedication, and sincere approach to coordinate, manage and run the entire process of Mid-Day Meal Programme.

At this juncture, we would like to attribute the Foundation’s success to many factors. Among all there were three key factors:

Our crystal clear mission and vision

• Mission: To reach 5 million children by 2020.
• Vision: No child in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger.

A successful Public-Private Partnership

The Akshaya Patra Foundation employs the Public-Private Partnership approach to run its operational activities. The Foundation runs its mid-day meal programme in partnership with the Central and various State Governments. These Government bodies support us by providing grain and cash subsidies to successfully run the mid-day meal scheme. Apart from the Government aid, corporate houses and individual donors also extend their generous support.

Our Operation Model

Our Operation Model has been driven to optimum functioning by a chain of departments coming together in a coordinated manner. No department in Akshaya Patra functions in a standalone manner. The profile of each department is structured in a way that it gets complete only when it is interlinked with other departments. This structural set-up of the Foundation, in turn has resulted in “Excellence in Operations”. The various departments involved in the success of the organization are: