Introduction

Akshayapatra (Sanskrit: अक्षयपात्र) meaning inexhaustible vessel, is an object from

Hindu mythology. It was a wonderful vessel given to Yudishtira by the Lord Surya
which held a never-failing supply of food to the Pandavas every day.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a non-profit organisation in India that runs school

lunch programme across India. The organisation was established in 2000. It feeds
18,02,517 children every day across India. The food distributed by Akshaya Patra is
perceived to be "hygienic, nutritious and delicious".

It is a world’s largest NGO run Mid-Day Meal programming serving over 1.8 million
children in 16,856 schools across 12 states & 2 union territories in India.

History of Akshaya Patra

Foundation

Looking out of a window, one day in Mayapur, a village

near Calcutta, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Prabhupada saw a group of children fighting with stray dogs over scraps of food.
From this simple, yet heart-breaking incident was born a determination that no child
within a radius of ten miles from our centre should go hungry.

His inspiring resolve sowed the seeds of The Akshaya Patra Foundation. With the vision: "No
child in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger," Akshaya Patra started the
Mid-Day Meal Programme in June 2000 by serving mid-day meals to 1,500 children across
five government schools in Bengaluru, Karnataka. A humble beginning, yet, the initial days
of implementing the programme was not a smooth sail. Soon came the helping hands of
Mohandas Pai, who took the initiative of donating the first vehicle to transport food to the
schools; and Abhay Jain, who promised to bring in more donors to contribute for the further
expansion of the programme.

In partnership with the Government of India and various State Governments, as well as
philanthropic donors; the organisation is running the world’s largest Mid-Day Meal
Programme. Built on a Public-Private Partnership model, Akshaya Patra combines good
management, innovative technology, and smart engineering to deliver nutritious and hygienic
school lunch on every school day.

Nature of business

The Akshaya Patra foundation is a non-profit organisation in India that runs school lunch
programme across India.

It is principally involved in implementing the Mid-Day Meal programme to the children in

Government and Government-aided schools across India. It follows a Public-Private
Partnership model of operation, and hence working in partnership with the Central and State
Government.

Vision, Mission and Quality Policy

VISION: No children in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger.

MISSION: To feed 5 million children by 2025.

Quality and Food Safety are the primary ingredients at each of the Akshaya Patra kitchens.
Learning from the past, they introduced various metrics in every area of operations and
service delivery. They are also partnered with different organisations to review the quality of
the mid-day meals we prepare and serve children. To maintain the quality of the meal,
standardisation of recipes across all locations has been undertaken. To improve quality
standards, advance projects like Kaizen and 5S have been started in different locations.
Employee Health and Safety activities are conducted to further increase hygiene standards
and improve safety and health.

Akshaya Patra has opened its first Food Safety and Quality Control Lab in Ahmedabad. The
lab has been fitted with state-of-the-art equipment, and high-precision testing instruments.
Some of the technologies featuring in the lab are the table top refractometer which will be
used to analyse total soluble solids, fat purity, adulteration of oil etc. Another interesting
machine is the spectrophotometer which will be used to evaluate DNA/protein concentration,
absorbance, transmittance etc. The lab was set up with the technical assistance of the Central
Food Technological Research Institute, Mysuru. The lab was sponsored by the Jamsetji Tata
Trust.

All the kitchens of Akshaya Patra follow a standard process for preparing the mid-day meals.
This process is charted out to ensure hygiene and quality of the cooked meal and also to
adhere to the food safety standards. All the cooking equipment like cauldrons, trolleys, rice
chutes and sambar/dal tanks, cutting boards, knives etc. are sterilised using steam before the
cooking process begins. The vessels used in the kitchens are made of stainless steel of 304
grade and is best for cooking and handling food.

The decentralised kitchen units are equipped with necessary cooking equipment like chapati
pans, cooking vessels for rice and dal and vessels for transporting the cooked mid-day meals
to the schools. Personal hygiene and Food Safety training are provided regularly to the
kitchen staff to ensure hygiene standards are met.
All the kitchens have well trained Cooks and Production Supervisors to manage and
supervise the production. Critical Control Points (CCPs) like cooking temperature are
checked and recorded at periodic intervals to ensure the right quality of the meal.

To ensure food quality is maintained, Quality Check is done by the Quality Officers in each
kitchen.

Work flow Model

One of the biggest innovations by Akshaya Patra is the construction of
gravity flow based kitchens. Such a centralized kitchen is divided into 4 floors, each
allocated to a different task. Seven to eight tons of rice, six to seven tons of vegetables and
two tons of pulses are cooked each day in just this one kitchen. Each centralized kitchen is
capable of cooking 1.8 million meals per day, with the largest situated at Hubli-Dharwad
and capable of cooking 185,000 meals daily. The organisation sources its food stocks from
local markets, thereby reducing costs associated with transportation and food spoilage, while
supporting the local economy. The Rice Master Silo has a capacity to store 270 tons of rice at
one time.

Cooking starts at about 3am each day, and it takes about three hours to complete the entire
sequence from pre-processing to packing of the cooked food. Technology has been brought in
wherever possible to cut down costs, bring in speed and scale up operations. The furnace is
being fed with briquettes, which are made from bagasse, the fibrous by-product of the
sugarcane industry which is being efficiently used here as bio-fuel.

Gravity flow kitchen starts from fourth floor and ends in ground floor. How it works at
different floors can be seen with help table as below,
 Floor sequence Work flow
Fourth Floor Altar room
Day silos
Training room
Store

Third Floor Store

Pre Processing Area
Cold room
Second Floor Board room
Viewers gallery
Admin block
Rest room
First Floor Chapathi preparation area
Cooking area
RO Plant
Manager cabin
Ground Floor Reception
Packing area
Main panel room
First aid room

In each floor activities are different and from top to bottom all the activities are done in a
systematic way.

The below picture shows clear idea of Akshaya Patra’s gravity flow kitchen.

GRAVITY KITCHEN WORK FLOW

The top floor i.e.4th floor is reserved for storage facility and it also having training room.
Storage facility containing cold storage capacity of 5 tonnes and all the vegetables and milk
are stored in less than 5 degree.

The 3rd floor is reserved for Pre-processing. This is where vegetables are chopped, rice and
dal (dried lentils) are washed, and all other preparations are done before the actual cooking
begins. The vegetables are cleaned in accordance to the three tank water system. First with
plain water, then with 50 – 100ppm chlorine water for 10 minutes, and finally again with the
plain water. 120kg capacity of chutes are there. It included by 8 rice chutes, 8 sambar chutes
and 60 sambar vessels. There are vegetable chopping machines, each of which can cut more
than half a ton of vegetables in an hour. After chopping and washing, the raw materials are
dropped down to the second floor of the kitchen via chutes, where they are collected for
cooking.

The Second floor is a hub of viewers gallery. Board room, admin block also there in 2nd
floor. By standing in 2nd floor viewers gallery we can observe the cooking area which takes
place in 1st floor.
The first floor of the kitchen is where all the cooking takes place. The process employed is
steam based cooking to ensure maximum efficiency. Massive rice cookers that take about
fifteen minutes to cook 100kg of rice, which can feed 1200 students. The daily requisite
amount of rice is transferred from the master silo to day silos from where it is washed and
sent to the cooking floor through gravity. We saw almost zero human contact with the food
being prepared, ensuring high levels of hygiene.

Advantages of using steam:

o Cost effective
o Early cooking
o Healthy and nutritious food (doesn’t lose its nutrition)
o Eco friendly

About seven to eight tons of dal was being used in this single kitchen per day. The sambar (a
popular South-Indian gravy dish of lentils and vegetables) is also cooked in steam heated
cauldrons, which take about two hours to prepare sambar that can serve 6,500 students. There
are 48 varieties of sambar they do. And the taste is assured by 10 quality parameters.
Chapathi also prepared here using well organised machines. Machine takes 40kg of flour
once and makes chapathies.

After cooking, the rice is sent down to the packing area, which is located on the ground
floor. The rice comes down again through chutes, under which large, air-tight, stainless steel
containers are placed to pack the rice and take it to the schools. The emphasis on hygiene is
plain to see at all stages, as all cooks and helpers are dressed in clean overalls, with head
caps, large hand gloves and gum boots. All employees and guests are given special footwear
which they can wear only inside the kitchen.

The dal or sambar is also sent to the packing area by gravity, where it is packed into separate
containers. The daily meal at Bangalore schools consists of rice, sambar and curd. A sweet
treat is included once a week.

And the packed meals put to vehicles. 29 plus 5 vehicles are there to distribute food to
schools in different locations. Vehicles are so arranged that each vehicle covers 40km area
near by schools. Batch code is maintained on each and every vessel that will help in easy
identification of school name and meal basket. Each vehicle’s capacity is 5000 meals. And
each vehicle is attached with GPS tracker.

The items on the mid-day meal menu vary from region to region, and are decided keeping in
mind the staple diet of the children it caters to. In the northern part of the country, the rice is
substituted by chapattis (Indian bread) as the main source of carbohydrates, along with the
typical dal, vegetables and sweets of the region. Local cooks and locally sourced raw
materials ensure that the taste of the food is close to what the children are used to eating at
their homes.

Curd is provided along with the meal to ensure a well-balanced diet. The curd is sourced
directly from the milk co-operatives and distributed into containers for the schools. After the
meal is cooked and packed, the cleaning process begins with high-powered hot water jets
being forced into the smallest of crevices inside the cutting machines, chutes, boilers, sambar
channels, sambar tanks, ladle, etc to sanitize them for the next batch of cooking to begin early
the next morning.

The packed food is loaded onto custom-designed delivery vans. A complex system has been
worked out to optimize routes and it is a daily task to ensure that the right containers are
reaching the right schools. There are many variables that need to be factored in like the
number of students in each school, whether they require assistance with serving plates and
vessels, etc.

The vans are ready to leave by 6 am from the centralized kitchen to reach the government
schools situated even in the remote areas of rural Bangalore by lunch time. There are 35
routes served by this kitchen which caters to 720 schools and 1.2 Lakh students. There is
another centralized kitchen in Bangalore, the oldest one of Akshaya Patra Foundation, located
in the premises of the ISKCON temple, which still caters to 600 schools with over 1Lakh
students.
The arrival of the blue vans is eagerly awaited by the students. We went to a government
school in Bangalore served by the Akshaya Patra kitchen, and got to experience first-hand the
distribution of the meal and the bright smiles of the students. Once the food was unloaded at
the school, the students gathered in the main courtyard to say a prayer of thanks, after which
the students were encouraged to get their plates and collect the food.

The students then sat together and had their meal, while chatting happily. They were allowed
to go for any number of helpings. Akshaya Patra provides meals to these schools as part of
the government mid-day meal program. However, the government funding accounts for only
about half the cost of the meal. To ensure good quality and unlimited quantity of its meals,
Akshaya Patra raises the remaining funds from corporations, individual donors and institutes.

It’s back to class for these kids, who have had a healthy meal and can now concentrate on
their studies without being disturbed by hunger pangs. The smiles on their faces are evidence
enough that when the government works with private entities and civil society, the impact
that can be achieved is phenomenal. Today, in more than 9000 schools across India, the
ringing of school bells and sparkle of their eyes will tell you what the million children are
waiting for – just one hot meal!

Sponsors profile

Akshaya Patra has an annual budget of $35 million, and 60 percent of that comes from the
Indian government in the form of cash or donations of food. The other 40 percent comes
from corporate and private donors, such as Desh Deshpande, chairman of Akshaya Patra.
Corporate companies include Infosys, NMBT, NMDC, LIONS CLUB, CHANDRA
FOUNDATION etc. and some individuals also included.
Abu Dhabi is one of the leading partners of The Akshaya Patra Foundation. The company is
sponsoring mid-day meals for 2000 plus children across various locations in Bengaluru.
Auma India has been partnering with The Akshaya Patra Foundation from the year 2008,
even before CSR became a policy under the companies' act.

Achievements/ Awards

 National Award for Child welfare 2016

 Entered Guinness World Records
 Supported Flood-relief Efforts by Handing out
 ICAI Gold Shield Award for Excellence in Financial Reporting for 2016-17
 Started Great India Talent Foundation, a quality day-boarding
 Launched a mobile laboratory to monitor food quality across kitchens in Andhra
Pradesh and Telangana
 Serving milk every day to 3.34 lakh children in Bengaluru and Hubballi
 Akshaya Nidhi extended the meal programme to employees of Bruhat Bengaluru
Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and construction workers as well

Supply Chain Management

Supply chain in Akshaya Patra followed as under,

Raw Material Akshaya Patra Kitchen Schools

Supplier

Akshaya Patra is having vendors for raw material all over the India. Each food grain, rice,
wheat and everything will be provided with separate batch codes for easy and best quality
control.
Meals prepared will be sent to schools within 12:30 p.m. There are 29 vehicles serve meals to
different government and non-government schools from Vasanthpuram kitchen. And the
meal temperature will remain minimum 65 degree. Meals will not spoil till 24 hrs.

In this way raw material received from vendors converted to meal in kitchen and it
will be distributed to schools accordingly.

Inventory Management

Fresh vegetables are procured on a daily basis. After

procurement, sorting of vegetables is done to retain the best
quality. All the vegetables are cleaned with potable water and
sanitised before the cutting process. Cold storage is used to store
ready-to-cook cut vegetables to retain freshness. Rice is supplied
by the Food Corporation of India (FCI). Before the cooking
process, the rice is machine-cleaned and washed thoroughly. In
order to ensure all the raw materials are fresh, all the kitchens
follow the FIFO (First In First Out)and FEFO (First Expiry First
Out) methods while issuing the raw material for production.

By doing so, the kitchens are able to properly identify, store and
retrieve the raw materials in an appropriate manner.
SWOT ANALYSIS

Strength:
 Strong relationship with existing suppliers
 Strong Brand Equity and Brand Awareness

Weakness:
 Lack of Work force diversity
 Lack of return on investment

Opportunities:
 Developments in Artificial Intelligence
 Changing Technology Landscape

Threats:

 Traffic problem
 Reaching distanced places
Learning Experience

The industrial visit to Akshaya Patra was a wonderful visit from our college. We were around
60 students went from our B section and our visit was really memorable one. The visit
provided me in depth understanding in various processes undertaken at the Akshaya Patra.
They gave some physical works to do, so that we came to know that how to do that particular
work and got proper idea about that.

As the name itself says inexhaustible vessel is a great service provided by Akshaya Patra
NGO. Their vision is to NO CHILD IN INDIA SHALL BE DEPRIVED OF EDUCATION
BECAUSE OF HUNGER they are trying their best. And not only trying they are also
succeeded.

As an MBA student syllabus knowledge is not enough to us. Actual working condition and
management of physical, human, and financial resources in real situation is plays a major role
in organisation. In our syllabus they mentioned so many functions, steps, procedures,
strategies, communication, co-ordination, management of everything and their scope and
significance and all the other things. But we didn’t understand the real reason behind that.
But after visiting to Akshaya Patra we came to know that the actual condition. Though books
give proper knowledge but mere knowledge is having no value addition to future. But having
experience will contribute in great result. It is really glad to me to say that I got the
opportunity to experience through our college and great co-operation of facilitator of
Akshaya Patra foundation ,Vasanthpuram.

There are some of the insights that we gathered while understanding the operations at
Akshaya Patra. The visit to the kitchen was indeed a memorable one. We were happy to see
that the food prepared in the kitchen was of highest quality, hygienic, nutritious and cooked
with immense care. The kitchen was none like we have seen before, the cleanliness and the
detail to hygiene while preparing the food was amazing, to say the least. I would like to
specially thank the facilitator of the visit to the kitchen who gave us a very detailed
explanation regarding the kitchen and its operations. Being management students, this was
like an education tour as well, where we could witness few of the concepts that we are taught
at the college.

Till that of visit I never visited any organisation it was my first visit and I was so happy and
so thankful to everyone behind the success of this visit. I come to know that start from the
purchase of raw material, storing, cleaning and washing, preparing food, packing and lastly
transportation and distribution. We didn’t left with any steps or functions in organisation and
its management.

At last I want to say we had lot of fun, great knowledge, lot of creative ideas, experienced
being a worker, usage of technology etc etc. finally to say got bundle of knowledge.

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