Food for Education
MLC Vanguard | Created by Akshaya Patra
Our core Mid-day Meal program provides free lunches to children at all Government schools in India in order to enhance enrollment, retention and attendance, and also improve access to nutrition.
1,800,000 Lives Impacted
Hear how we impact lives directly from Jyotiranjan Das, Grade 5. He is a Gotipua Dancer living in Puri https://indi.com/9cxk3. Meet the twins from Bengaluru with the same ambition. Harshita & Varshita are not just sisters but best friends who are keen on joining the Indian Police Service. Watch the video to know more about them and how we impact their lives. https://www.akshayapatra.org/video-gallery/we-are-harshita-and-varshita-beneficiaries. Momeen is 15-yr-old beneficiary from Jaipur District of Rajasthan who began practicing singing while listening to songs on television and radio. Today, he occasionally performs at the school and wishes to perform on a bigger stage someday. https://www.akshayapatra.org/video-gallery/momeen-hussain-aspiring-singer-from-jaipur
The Innovation
Our core Mid-day Meal program provides free lunches to children at all Government schools in India in order to enhance enrollment, retention and attendance, and also improve access to nutrition. The Government of India mandated the mid-day meal for school children in 2003; since then, Akshaya Patra has partnered with the Government to serve cooked mid-day meals at Government schools. Our beneficiaries, ages 6-14 years old, mostly come from under-resourced families. For many of the children that we serve, our meal is the only meal they have in a day. For struggling families, mid-day meals are an incentive to send their children to school where they have access to educational opportunities. While at school, the mid-day meal program provides nutrition needed to develop key cognitive abilities and learn. This is particularly impactful for our beneficiaries who come from families of migrant workers in construction or farming jobs and lack kitchen infrastructure to store and prepare nutritious food.
We source local produce, operate 41 centralized and 2 decentralized kitchens and transport hot, nutritious meals in custom designed vans to ensure food safety. Our kitchens can cook anywhere between 10,000 to 250,000 meals within 6 hours.
Implemented in
India, Serbia, Tanzania, Lebanon, Syria, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, US, Ireland
Get in touch
Chandani Punia
About Akshaya Patra
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is an NGO in India headquartered in Bengaluru. Our organisation strives to eliminate classroom hunger by implementing the Mid-Day Meal Scheme in the government schools and government-aided schools. Alongside, Akshaya Patra also aims at countering malnutrition and supporting the right to education of socio-economically disadvantaged children.
Since 2000, Akshaya Patra has been concerting all its efforts towards providing fresh and nutritious meals to children on every single school day. We are continuously leveraging technology to multiply our reach. The state-of-the-art kitchens have become a subject of study and have attracted curious visitors from around the world.
Today, Akshaya Patra is the world’s largest (not-for-profit run) Mid-Day Meal Programme serving wholesome food every school day to over 1.8 million children from 19,039 schools across 13 states & 1 Union territory of India.
