Education...on a full stomach and nutritious meal!

Had an opportunity to explore and briefly immerse in the work of Akshaya Patra - a programme that provides food to over 1 million children in India. Now feeding 11,98,206 children everyday!

Millions of children in India don't get enough food for them to have any motivation or energy to really attend school or 'engage with learning'. Different studies put the number of children missing school because of lack of adequate food ranging from 7 million to 40 million across India.

Akshaya Patra focuses on this group of children. Through a range of public private partnerships, several schools now benefit from a very organized, nutritious mid-day meal.

What differentiates the Akshaya Patra effort from several other 'feeding children' initiatives is really how they have dealt with the size of the problem. By designing and engineering highly replicable, standardized processes. Spread across 8 states in India, accessible through centralized and decentralized kitchens, this non-profit organization is looking to reach 5 million children by 2020.

This mission is powered by some very large scale planning. A quick look at some numbers and the size of the operations, just in one kitchen!




The Kitchen on the Kanakpura road, Bangalore:

• Designed on the simple principles of gravity - this kitchen is a highly effective, eco-friendly operation that uses renewable fuel (husk based fuel) and recycles a large part of its waste
• Feeds around 100,000 children everyday. Plus Old people, expecting mothers and the local jail
  
• The kitchen cooks approx 6000 kgs of rice and 12,000-20,000 litres of sambhar/ dal (lentils) everyday
• Procures 5000 kgs of vegetables and 8000 litres of yogurt everyday
• Stores approximately 270 tonnes of rice for a month provided by the FCI for the mid day meal...apart from that procures rice for the BBMP scheme to feed old people in the communities
• Around 250 members work within this kitchen in 2-3 shifts starting at 3 am and going on till 6.30-7.00 pm
• People from local communities are employed in the kitchens - generating employment and building training and skills in cooking, hygiene, production, distribution..
  
• Over 3000 employed across all kitchens in India
  

Getting a hot nutritious meal to over a million children everyday is no mean feat! A brilliant example of achieving 'Scale' in social impact - comparable to any factory model for food production and distribution, Akshaya Patra has taken the job of cooking and distributing food to disadvantaged communities to another level of seriousness. Its engagement with the government at a regional level and ability to manage a diverse set of stakeholders in ensuring that healthy food reaches children and the needy is another aspect of its incredibly quiet but effective style of working.

Next level of innovation sensitive areas - community engagement, several million more children, scale out and scale up - get more education and nutrition based organizations to adopt the principles that are working here, building significantly enhanced nutrition in simple meals...so much more..

Dream-a-Dream

Friday afternoon 4.30 pm. Children from Ananya Shikshana Kendra and Makkala Jagriti are getting together at the SPT Sports Academy, Bangalore to play a friendly football match. Dream-a-Dream, a Bangalore based Civil Society Organization, facilitates the match for the children as a part of their sports program to build Life Skills in underprivileged children.

The kids from Makkala Jagriti are a little late - the Dream-a-Dream bus has picked them up from their school and tackled heavy Bangalore city traffic to bring them over to the Sports Academy. But when they arrive there is a flurry of reunion - kids meeting each other, colour jerseys and football studs being worn, boys and girls ready for the match - everyone excited to be outdoors, playing. The youngest child is around 6 years old all the way to senior kids from grades 8, 9 and above. The children are separated by height and age - and smaller teams are created. Each group then goes into a separate part of the field to warm up under the guidance of the team of coaches.

Ajit Gupta - the head Coach of the SPT Football programme tells me he is really excited to be doing these sessions. His team also runs 'regular' sessions each weekend where eager parents from in and around Bangalore bring their children in for Football Coaching. But Coach Ajit says working with the kids from Dream-a-Dream is energizing. The children are eager, very ready to be coached and wanting to learn and use every minute of the time they have on the field.

The senior children are formed into two teams and the rules are laid down for the match - boys and girls form part of each team. The coach tells me that the number of girls has been steadily increasing. The game gets under way - and gets into a heated mode real soon. By half time one side is clearly ahead - the other team is dejected. The coach huddles the team - and teaches them to deal with the frustration of loosing and convert it into strategy for the next half.

This is truly a life skills session. None of this can be taught in the regular academic classes. And without the support from Dream-a-Dream, the children from Ananya and Makkala Jagriti would not really have a chance to learn these critical skills of life survival - through such a fun and engaged excercise.



These life skills have the capacity of being a great leveler between regular and 'underprivileged' children. Vishal Talreja, the young CEO of the organization passionately believes in that possibility. At the end its about how well you can deal with issues, problems, situations in life - and the programmes run by his team focus on helping build that capacity through co-curricular activities.

Covering a key area of skill building their work focuses on the critical portion of the gap between an underprivileged child and his/ her ability to work with equal opportunities.




Working across several partners in Bangalore who work with underprivileged children, D-a-D is now looking to scale up their work and are struggling to determine if the scale that they want to achieve should be in terms of deeper impact or more numbers covered - or both? Given that this is a critical need area. That triggered the discussion and work with Innovation Alchemy.





They have built an amazing network of volunteers who come together to support the various activities and programmes. A small core team manages the operations and works through partner organizations and volunteers to reach over 2000 children in Bangalore. That's not a small number considering each child is in atleast one activity each week of the academic year.

As the Dream-a-Dream core Team came together last month for a 'scale-architecture' session, clearly the idea they have experimented with and fine tuned incredibly over the last 7-8 years is powerful, the operations are effective - and now its time to potentially reach 500,000 children in the next 5 years! Through a whole new service model leveraging Learning Skills Experts. The thought of being able to do that has energized the team! With a powerful fund raising base, D-a-D hopes to increase its reach and impact significantly - and also go beyond Bangalore and Mysore soon...

You can support their work by running in the Mumbai Marathon coming January. Infact you will find Dream-a-Dream at some of the biggest marathons across India, being supported by a bevy of volunteers who enjoy raising funds and giving time to this project...

School!

Govt. School, Kurivundi, Nanjangud Taluk, Mysore District.

On a trip into the Cotton farming belt around Mysore, came by this charming school. The students were having a science exhibition.

Turbines, water harvesting systems, water storage & sprinkling systems for dry rain-fed areas.....wonderful little experiments that reflected keen minds, a science teacher's involvement in his students... and the fact that most experiments were looking to solve local contextual problems. More on that in a separate blog post ...but what really caught my attention was the beautiful charming faces of the happy children...

Everyone wanted to get into the picture - and getting so many excited faces together into the frame made these images come alive!

The colour blue...in Hinotia

Hinotia is a small village in Madhya Pradesh, close to Vidisha, some kilometers off the main road, and surrounded by soybean fields. I was there with a small team from ITC as a part of our project on rural distribution.

In the last few months I have had the opportunity to visit plenty of villages deep inside UP, MP and Rajasthan - somehow Hinotia stands out for me. I was amazed by the simple beauty of this village - narrow but clean lanes, artistic layout and the use of the color Blue!

Many houses had been recently painted for Diwali, so they looked new. I asked the local Sanchalak if there was a significance to the color being used so much - he said "bas..logon to pasand hai" (people seem to like it here -:).

Primary colours in Pondicherry

This was a weekend trip to Pondicherry in March'08. My first to this little township. Enchanting of course. I'd heard so much about Pondy, had visualized the streets, the ashram and the 'french-ness' of the place from what I had seen and heard about it.

The day we got there it was pouring rain. Unnatural for this part of the year. It was torrential. It poured through the weekend - so we spent time in the beautiful Promenade hotel, watching the ocean swell with the rain.

But when the rain cleared it left behind clean, washed streets, and all the colors in the environment seemed to stand out boldly...there was a cheer in the air...

So I decided to capture Pondy in three primary colour compositions - yellow, blue and red...