Akshaya Patra, the NGO that today serves up hot mid-day meals to around 14 lakh children in 10,770 government and aided schools across 10 states and 24 locations, intends to scale up its operations by 2020 to feed 50 lakh children. “We want to create a demonstrable model for other like-minded initiatives to follow,” says Shridhar Venkat, CEO, The Akshaya Patra Foundation, of the scale it wants to achieve.
Corporate core group
Working quietly behind the scenes of the Foundation is a core group of former corporate sector executives, who quit corporate life for the cause of fighting malnutrition and hunger. “One of the core strengths of Akshaya Patra is the professionals from industry who are helping it grow. The organisation today is a confluence of missionary spirit and professionalism — we have former executives from Airtel, Motorola, APC, Tejas Networks, TCS, TVS and so on, who quit their careers to join us. Many of them are youngsters who want to make a change. This passion has helped us scale up,” says Venkat, who himself was a VP, Sales, at Webex (now Cisco), before he joined as the CEO. To view a video interview of CEO Shridhar Venkat on Akshaya Patra, click here .
Another reason for the colossal scale of the group is the focus on mid-day meals scheme. “We stayed only with what we know best and didn’t venture into other things. The third reason for rapid scaling up is the use of technology. We were the first NGO that used technology to scale up, where we used steam-based, large machines to cook,” explains Venkat, who spoke to BLoC on the sidelines of the Indian Management Conclave organised by MBAUniverse.com at ISB, Hyderabad, recently. Venkat had made a presentation on Akshaya Patra at the conclave.
The impact of the programme, launched in year 2000 in a small way, has been very demonstrable, says Venkat. School enrolment has increased; in a school in Hubli, for instance, there was a 30 per cent increase in enrolment, with more girls joining.
The numbers
Akshaya Patra served up its billionth meal in 2012 and will serve the second billion this November. The first billion took it 12 years; the second, four years; third billion will happen in two years time and thereafter, the Foundation expects to serve an additional billion meals every year. Typically a 100,000 meals capacity kitchen, which costs ₹18-20 crore to set up, will cook close to seven tonnes of rice, five tonnes of vegetables and seven tonnes of dal, every day.
The Foundation has 24 kitchens of varying sizes; the one in Hubli can dish out 200,000 meals and an automatic machine makes 40,000 chappathis an hour. Each kitchen will have 250 people, from cooks to those who handle the logistics. They are mostly employees; Akshaya Patra has 6,000 on the staff now. “We can’t pay market salaries; we tell those who join that if money is your goal, this is not the place. We pay two-third of market salaries at least,” points out Venkat.
Akshaya Patra functions purely through Central and State government grants, which meet 60 per cent of its costs and the rest, it raises through donations. “I have a fundraising team of 90 people, right from tele marketers, direct marketers to an internet team; all that’s there in a large organisation, we have here and we function the way a large corporate house does. We want to make Akshaya Patra a great place to work for, so we bring in all the good elements of a corporate. But we have the brain of a corporate and heart of an NGO,” elaborates Venkat. But, one of the challenges is fundraising; if fundraising is predictable, it can scale up this programme further, he adds.