Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus makes a visit to Akshaya Patra kitchen

The first Sunday in February was a special day for Akshaya Patra and its staff in Hubballi kitchen. On that day Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Laureate and Founder of Grameen Bank visited the Akshaya Patra kitchen in Hubballi.

The other guests who arrived along with Prof. Yunus included Anousheh Ansari, Co-founder, Chairwoman and CEO of Prodea Systems and Dr “Desh” Deshpande of the Deshpande Foundation.

Sridhar Venkat, CEO, The Akshaya Patra Foundation had welcomed the prestigious guests.  The dignitaries were then taken around the kitchen and summarised up on all the important operations which go into the making of the mid-day meal. 

All the dignitaries, including Prof. Muhammad Yunus appreciated Akshaya Patra’s efforts to help underserved children in India. “Akshaya Patra is dealing with this critical issue in a manner so beautifully that nobody can beat it and hence it should further scale up so that more number of children can receive Akshaya Patra’s meals and become physically fit and mentally ready to absorb things around,” Prof. Muhammad Yunus said, during the visit. 

The Akshaya Patra Hubli kitchen visit was followed with the Development Dialogue, a conference held every year at the Deshpande Foundation.  During the function, Sridhar Venkat was honoured with an award in recognition of the services delivered by Akshaya Patra.

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Necessity of Nutrition for Children to have better Education

Hunger is a social evil. It may not necessarily force someone to do something evil, but it will definitely not allow him to concentrate on the task at hand, and concentration, as we all know, is of immense importance when the task at hand is ‘learning’. So how do children cope with this evil? It will be naïve to think they do.

If a child skips his breakfast, he will not be able to concentrate on learning because of hunger, and as a result, his performance will go down. Now skipping the breakfast or any meal is one thing; not affording one is another. Children from poor families fall into the latter category. They can’t even afford a meal at times, leave alone a nutritious meal. How then, will they concentrate on educational activities?

Iodine deficiency alone can result in reduced cognitive functions; imagine the damage hunger can do to a child’s learning abilities.

It’s also important to understand that under-nutrition doesn’t just affect the child’s health but also jeopardizes his future. A poor diet in childhood results in below par performance in academics, which, in turn, results in fewer job opportunities. As a result, he is not able to achieve much professionally and his children are also subjected to a poor diet, starting the vicious cycle all over again.

In order to address hunger and problems related to it—in the education sector in particular, we need concrete solutions. The Government of India has identified the problem and implemented the Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), a school lunch programme, to tackle it. That it is widely considered one of the best school feeding programmes in the world shouldn’t come as a surprise as it reaches out to over 120 million children.

As the mid-day meal programme intends to improve the nutritional status of children, strict nutritional guidelines have been laid with respect to its implementation. While students from class I to V are entitled to receive 450 calories and 12 gm protein from their meal, children from class VI to VIII are entitled to receive 700 calories and 20 gm protein.

School feeding programmes don’t just help in improving the nutritional health of children but also provide an incentive for them to come to school and more importantly, for the parents to send their children to school.

The mid-day lunch provided in schools is also important because at times, this is the only meal these children have throughout the day. The MDMS covers government and government-aided schools. Many children studying in these schools come from families who can’t afford a nutritious meal. For these children, the school lunch programme comes as a blessing in disguise.

Additionally, it helps in improving enrolment in schools and reducing the drop-out rate, as many people, who would otherwise force their children to leave school and work to support the family, allow them to continue studying. Even those who force their girl child to drop out of school and work in kitchen as they believe it will help them after marriage, are now allowing them to continue schooling.

Then there are the positive effects on attendance. It is highly unlikely that a healthy child will miss the school because of illness. In contrast, a malnourished child is more likely to be absent on regular basis because of some underlying health condition.

There is no dearth of independent studies supporting the fact that the MDMS has been successful in providing necessary nutrition to children, reducing drop-out rate, improved attendance, and more importantly, helped children excel in school. The need of the hour therefore, is to work on reaching every corner of the country to ensure that no child goes to bed hungry or misses out on education because of hunger.

Can Food Security Contribute to Economic Growth?

Food security is in news once again. First, the Supreme Court pulled up some states for their failure to implement the National Food Security Act, 2013, even after two years since it was signed into law. Then came the murmurs about the NDA government planning to allocate 130,000 crore to this Act.

Though food security is more often in news for all the wrong reasons in most countries, the fact that it ignites a debate in India, where an estimated 194.6 million people are undernourished (The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2015), definitely comes as a surprise.

So why is a system that promises to do good to people, subjected to brickbats? It promises food grain entitlements for poor under the Public Distribution System (PDS), entitlements like mid-day meals for school children and nutritious food for children below the age of six, and even maternity benefits in monetary form. Why then, is it still receiving flak from most quarters?

It’s worth noting that the debate surrounding the national food security mission is largely fueled by unfounded claims and exaggerated figures. And amidst all the chaos, genuine concerns and positives of the concept seem to have taken a backseat.

Most people fail to understand that food security doesn’t just protect people from poverty and insecurity, but also plays a significant role in economic growth. While being overtly critical about how much it will cost the exchequer and arguing that the country doesn’t have the revenue to support it, people seem to ignore the fact that it can do some good as well.

One area where it can yield positive results is the field of human development. In an economy where malnutrition is prevalent, human resource is the most affected. In the absence of a well-developed food security system, the government is as it is going to spend a huge chunk of the GDP on temporary solutions. It might as well steer the same towards other areas of economic development.

Then again, food security results in improved nutrition, which, in turn, results in reduction of costs incurred in health sector. The same can then be used for other welfare schemes meant to eradicate poverty and other such social evils.

Being nourished and secured makes people more productive, and as obvious as it sounds, a productive workforce reflects positively on the economy. In contrast, insecure and malnourished workforce is most likely to have the opposite of desired effect on the economy.

It may seem like economic growth can address the problem of malnutrition, but that is not entirely true; not with uneven distribution of food resources and wastage of food, at least.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations the number of chronically undernourished people has come down from 1.3 billion in 1990 to 794 million as of 2014. While the reduction by 209 million means things are working, it also implies that more proactive steps are needed as there are 794 million people out there who still don’t receive nutritional food.

While the food security scheme is no doubt proactive, it’s the implementation part that needs to be given attention, which is difficult with all the negativity surrounding it.

Having enough food to eat is definitely a strong incentive: it's as simple as it get. It's another thing that such initiatives often get drowned in the game of political one-upmanship.

Akshaya Patra Chairman Madhu Pandit Dasa Honoured with Padma Shri

Madhu Pandit Dasa, Chairman of The Akshaya Patra Foundation has been conferred upon the Padma Shri. The prestigious award has been endowed to recognise the valuable contribution of Akshaya Patra towards the children of India.

Madhu Pandit Dasa, who is also the President of ISKCON Bangalore, has dedicated the award to His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, the spiritual leader whose inspiration led to the birth of Akshaya Patra in 2000. “Srila Prabhupada the founder of ISKCON desired that no one should go hungry in this country. This award is recognition of our humble service of leading this cause of nutrition for education amongst the government school children through the Akshaya Patra programme,” Madhu Pandit Dasa said.

Akshaya Patra, which has partnered with the Central and State Governments of India in delivering mid-day meals to school children, is one of the most appreciated Public Private Partnerships India has ever seen in the field of education and child welfare. Several case studies into the impact of Akshaya Patra Mid-Day Meal Programme have provided solid evidence to show that it has improved school enrolment, attendance, nutritional status of children and student concentration.

From designing the first centralised kitchen to distributing mid-day meals to school children in Bangalore, Madhu Pandit Dasa has a prominent role in making what Akshaya Patra is today. It was under his guidance that The Akshaya Patra Foundation grew from feeding 1500 children to over 1.4 million in 2016. Today, the Mid-Day Meal programme of Akshaya Patra is the largest NGO-run school lunch programme in the world.

Madhu Pandit Dasa has also been responsible for setting up a strong Governance Model in Akshaya Patra, with transparency and accountability as one of its core values.

Madhu Pandit Dasa, is an alumnus of IIT-Mumbai. While pursuing an M-Tech course in IIT Mumbai, he dedicated his life to the service of humanity by becoming a full-time member of ISKCON.

Read more: http://www.akshayapatra.org/news/Padma-Shri-conferred-upon-Madhu-Pandit-Dasa

Why children are hungry?

The concept of happiness changes with each person. For a young child, happiness is the time he or she gets to play, learn and enjoy with friends. However, today, millions of children across the world miss out the opportunity to happiness. How children enjoy childhood when issues like hunger, poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition follow them since birth?

Of course, we do have enough food to feed the entire world.  But still 795 million people (one in nine people) in the world are hungry and nearly 400 million children live in extreme poverty. But have you ever tried to find out the reasons behind this occurrence? Here are some reasons as pointed out by the World Food Programme (WFP), the largest humanitarian agency in the world fighting hunger.

Once fallen into the trap of poverty, according to the agency, it is tough to come out of it. The aftereffect is that people become weak and less capable of earning enough income to support their family.

Think how worse the situation will be when it is added with an unstable market. The fluctuating prices and high costs of food items, no doubt, can make lives of poor miserable and force them to either sacrifice food or to get satisfied with a cheaper and less-nutritious option, which is the start of malnutrition.

Like the unstable market, natural calamities also play a huge role in hunger. Floods, storms and drought can cause crop failures, losses of livestock and massive destruction of crops. Climate change and deforestation also pose threat to farmlands. Apart from these natural reasons, hunger and malnutrition can be sometimes a man-made phenomenon like war and riots.   

Similarly, lack of important agricultural infrastructure, has an indirect connection with hunger and poverty. Lack of proper roads can increase the transportation cost, absence of enough warehouses can make it difficult to store the food and lack of proper irrigation facilities can lead to shortage in water supplies.  All these together, can affect distribution and cost of food items.

Though these issues can be solved, it is a shame to reveal that we waste about one third of 1.3 billion tons of food produced in the world. 

The most concerning part comes when hunger strikes children. Childhood is one of the most important stages of growth in life and ousting hunger at this period is very crucial for remaining healthy later in life.

The good news is that there is a chance for hope. The World Food Programme (WFP) and millions of other non-profit organisations across the world have already started their fight against hunger. Interestingly, the World Food Programme has already provided food security to 80 million people in 75 countries and the day when we free the 400 million children from hunger and say proudly that ‘child hunger ends here’ is not far from reality.

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Akshaya Patra is not-for-profit organization working for the development of underprivileged children to eliminate hunger and illiteracy. The NGO in India is serving mid-day meal to 1.4 million children across 10 states of India.