Akshaya Patra’s largest kitchen, located in Hubli-Dharwad, prepares meals for 185,000 children in less than five hours. Food stocks are sourced from local farmers, insulating the program from external price shocks and the organization employs local workers. Now that Akshaya Patra has crossed its milestone of feeding one million children each school day, the organization’s next goal is to serve 5 million children daily by 2020.
Akshaya Patra has won many awards and accolades. In a letter, Akshaya Patra was heralded by President Barack Obama as “an imaginative approach that has the potential to serve as a model for other countries.” Akshaya Patra was the winner of the prestigious 2009 Tech Award in the education category and was a top five finalist in the 2008 American Express Members Project. Featured at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007 and 2008, Akshaya Patra was the winner of the ICAI Gold Shield Award for best financial reporting and was the winner of the 2008 CNBC-TV India Business Leader Award for Social Enterprise of the Year.
The kitchen from the outside – a three-storey building which uses Gravity Flow Mechanism developed in-house
by our team. Each kitchen has the capacity to cook between 50 000 to 100 000 mid-day meals per day.
Costing approximately 9 crores to set up, they are built with funds from public donations.
The kitchen from the inside, consisting of rice cauldrons each of which cooks up to 110kg of rice in 20 minutes.
Sambar cauldrons cook up to 1200 litres of sambar in two hours.
It is washed thoroughly on the 2nd floor
Washed rice is sent down the chute to the 1st floor
Rice pours down into steam heated cauldrons for cooking. The entire cooking process takes place on the 1st floor
Super heated steam is used to cook food instead of flame
When cooking is finished, it is loaded into trolleys
Cooked rice is sent down the chute to the ground floor
It flows down the pipe into containers
Piping hot rice on its way to being loaded into food vans. Around 6000 kilosof rice are cooked daily in each kitchen
Food materials in Kitchen
Stock in the kitchen
Washed dal and vegetables flows down the chute into sambar cauldron on the 1st floor
Vegetables and dal ready to be cooked
Sambar being cooked on the first floor
Cooked sambar is packed and sent to the food vans to be loaded
Chapati dough is mixed
Heavy rollers flatten the dough into thin sheets
Dough is cut into the classic round shape
Making chapatt
Collecting all the chapattis
Transporting akshayapatra food through bus
