Akshaya Patra’s School Feeding Program

The Akshaya Patra Foundation has been running the school feeding program since 2000. It began the school mid-day meal by feeding school children in five government schools in Bengaluru. The mid-day meal in school acts like an incentive for children to attend school and for parents to send children to school. This in turn allows children to get educated thereby increasing school enrolment and literacy rate and decreasing drop-out rate. Like Akshaya Patra there are other NGOs too that are implementing the school lunch program that had been initiated by Government of India to eliminate classroom hunger.

Akshaya Patra provides mid-day meal in school across 10 states of India covering 24 locations. In order to provide school mid-day meal, this NGO operates two formats of kitchen – centralised kitchen and decentralised kitchen. The Foundation operates centralised kitchen in 22 locations and decentralised kitchen in 2 locations. Akshaya Patra provides hygienic and wholesome school mid-day meal to over 1.4 million children every day. The service of this NGO has impacted millions of children by increasing enrolment and attendance, improved social equity along with enhanced concentration and energy levels.

Akshaya Patra aims to provide the benefit of school feeding program to 5 million children by 2020 thereby moving forward towards its vision of ‘no child in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger’. Thus the Foundation strategically plans and executes its expansion to new locations so that it can continue and sustain its service in among the existing beneficiaries.