By Brandon Keim
Fifteen years ago, at a Hare
Krishna temple in Bangalore,
India,
worshipers noticed that
children often came to eat the
meals that the temple customarily served
at the end of religious services. The kids
should have been in school. But for them,
as for millions
of other Indian children,
getting enough food was a more pressing
priority than getting an education. Instead
of giving out meals at the temple, some of
the worshipers started bringing food to a
nearby school. The kids who had been showing
up on the temple steps now showed up in
class. “This was just one small temple, solving
the food problem in its community,” recalls
Binali Suhandani, head of resource mobilization
at the Akshaya Patra Foundation,
an organization that emerged from the efforts
of those Hare Krishna worshipers. Akshaya
Patra has come a long way since then. Today
the organization maintains a network of high-efficiency
kitchens that enables it to serve hot
lunches to 1.4 million children at more than
10,500 schools in 10 Indian states.
The work of Akshaya Patra takes place
under the auspices of the Mid Day Meal
Scheme, an initiative to ensure that every
child in every Indian public school receives
a nutritious meal every school day. Enacted
by the Indian federal government in 1995,
the MDM scheme (as it’s commonly known)
gained the force of a Supreme Court order in
2001. Despite that legal mandate, however,
the federal government has failed to provide
adequate funding and logistical support for
the program. A variety of local and state
governments, along with various charitable
organizations, have moved to fill that gap.
Progress has been considerable but far from
complete: More than 100 million children
now receive food through the MDM scheme.
Yet India still has a child under-nutrition
rate that places it 120th out of 128 countries
on the Global Hunger Index, and nearly one
in three Indian children is underweight. Improving
those numbers will depend in part
on the ability of nonprofits such as Akshaya
Patra to expand their reach.
The leaders of Akshaya Patra (the term
means “inexhaustible vessel” in Sanskrit)
say that its mission isn’t simply about providing
food to hungry kids. It’s about social
development. It’s about fulfilling the educational
potential of children who otherwise
would struggle to learn on an empty stomach.
It’s about bridging the deep divides of
caste and class by creating a daily occasion
when children can sit down to a shared meal.
Madhu Pandit Dasa, founding chairman,
was one of the worshipers who attended
that little temple in Bangalore in 2000.
Akshaya Patra, he said in a 2007 speech,
is “more than a school meal program. It’s
a hunger-eradication program. It’s an education
program. It’s a social project. It’s a
nation-building
effort.” Matching that lofty
mission is a lofty goal: Akshaya Patra aims to
serve five million children by 2020. To meet
that objective, the organization will need to
leverage the well-functioning systems that
it has built. And it will need to overcome
several challenges that it faces.
Out of the Kitchen
At schools in the United States and other
wealthy nations, paid staff members typically
prepare school lunches on-site. In India,
that approach is often impractical. Many schools
in that country have no kitchen facilities.
In the early days of the MDM scheme, it
wasn’t uncommon for people to cook meals in
makeshift sheds or even in classrooms; overwhelmed
cooks would sometimes ask schoolchildren
for help. The leaders of Akshaya
Patra realized that it would be more efficient
to cook meals at a centralized kitchen and
then distribute them to schools. (That idea
came to the founders naturally: Several
of them had backgrounds in engineering.
Dasa, who studied at the Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay, designed the organization’s
first kitchen.)
Akshaya Patra now runs 23 cooking
facilities. The kitchens, which operate from
Sunday evening through Friday morning,
present a model of industrial design and automated
efficiency. In the north of India, where
local diets are grain-rich, bread-makers can
produce 60,000 pieces of flatbread in just
one hour. In the south, where rice is a staple,
cookers can heat 250 pounds of rice in 20
minutes. On average, the kitchens can produce
150,000 meals in less than five hours.
Such efficiency didn’t happen overnight,
according to Vinay Kumar, head of operations
at Akshaya Patra. Before joining
the organization in 2006, Kumar worked
as a business process consultant for consumer
manufacturing companies, and he
has brought that experience to bear on the
task of feeding large numbers of children.
He and his colleagues standardized processes
across multiple facilities. They also
implemented systems to share innovations
across the entire chain of kitchens. “Each of
our decisions is data-driven. Anything we
implement should be measured by data, replicable
in another place, and standardized,”
says Kumar. Kitchen workers know exactly
how long it takes to cook each meal. They
know how much kitchen capacity is required
to make that meal. They know which raw
materials are in hand and which materials
need to be purchased. The commitment to
efficiency doesn’t stop at the kitchen door.
Akshaya Patra uses path-optimizing software
to plot the delivery routes between
each kitchen and each school that it serves.
Sameer Prasad, professor of operations
management at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has studied Akshaya Patra and
its systems. The organization, he notes, has
taken supply-chain management practices
developed in the business world and applied
them to a nonprofit endeavor. Traditionally,
nonprofit organizations have not excelled
at operational efficiency. By optimizing its
kitchen systems, Akshaya Patra has made its
operation highly cost-effective: Its average
annual per-child cost is only about $30. It
has also been able to ensure that its meals
are fresh. Cooks use vegetables within just
a few days of procuring them, and the organization
prepares and distributes its meals
on the same day. Akshaya Patra leaders insist
that industrial efficiency doesn’t come
at the expense of food quality. “The same
meal which the children eat, my staff members
also eat,” says Sridhar Venkat, CEO.
Into the Future
Until now, Akshaya Patra has focused on
serving schools in urban locales, where its
distribution system is most effective. In
rural areas, where schools are far apart, the
efficiency of that system decreases dramatically.
Yet 70 percent of India’s population is
rural, so reaching children in those areas is
vital to the organization’s mission. Kumar
aims to develop high-efficiency kitchens to
serve rural and semi-urban areas over the
next three years, but meeting the standard
of efficiency that Akshaya Patra has established
in urban areas will be difficult. “Their
model works only when it’s in a more densely
populated place, and there are economies of
scale,” Prasad argues.
A bigger challenge involves funding.
Akshaya
Patra has an annual budget of
$35 million, and 60 percent of that sum
comes from the Indian government in the
form of cash or donations of food. The other
40 percent comes from corporate and private
donors. Despite support from high-profile
companies—among them Adobe Systems,
Caterpillar, and the State Bank of India—raising funds is a constant struggle. Recently,
according to Suhandani, the organization
has made headway in this area by focusing
on its online efforts and by gaining celebrity
endorsements. But raising money is only part
of the fundraising equation. Equally important
is being able to raise it at a steady pace.
“Making our income more predictable while
scaling up is a challenge,” says Venkat. “We
have a long way to go to make [the organization]
completely sustainable.”
The volatility of food markets in India
exacerbates that challenge. Over the past
decade, the country has experienced not
only regular price spikes but also long-term
inflation that has outpaced overall economic
growth. To manage that volatility, Akshaya
Patra now procures some of its produce
from commodity brokers, with whom it
can sign long-term contracts. But that’s
no guarantee of price stability. “We’ll find
only questions as we go along,” says Kumar.
Buying from brokers, instead of sourcing
food at local markets, may cause another
problem: Those who designed the MDM
program envisioned it partly as a way to
support local
farmers.
Underlying those challenges is a more
fundamental question about the Akshaya
Patra model: Are public-private partnerships
the right approach to meeting a basic
need like feeding schoolchildren? Some
observers
argue that midday meals shouldn’t
be subject
to the caprice of donors. “The
midday meal program is a right. It has to
be provided by the government,” says Biraj
Patnaik, a member of the steering committee
for the Right to Food Campaign, an
advocacy group. Advocates such as Patnaik
are pushing the government to index funding
for MDM programs to inflation. In the
absence of that safeguard, an increase in
food prices is tantamount to a budget cut.
Patnaik also warns against the potentially
outsized influence that private interests can
have when the government relies on public-private
partnerships.
Today, Akshaya Patra leaders are concentrating
on the goal of feeding five million
children by 2020. They’re also dealing
with hard choices about how to leverage
the organization’s
resources. In a recent
collaboration
with the Michael & Susan Dell
Foundation,
for example, Akshaya Patra provided
not only meals but also optical, dental,
and general health checkups to schoolchildren.
Given the reach of the organization’s
distribution network, such projects make
sense. But Venkat worries about trying to
do too many things too quickly. “Akshaya
Patra could have built toilets. We could have
got into teaching. We could have diversified
into many other areas,” he says. “But we
stayed focused on providing a simple, hot,
nutritious meal. We believe that simplicity
is the key to scaling up.”