In my earlier post I mentioned that I have been thinking about introducing a brief phase of guest-blogging for my blog. Although the context in which it was mentioned there was much different. That day later in the night, I thought about asking two of my close bloggers to contribute an article as a part of guest blogging project of my blog. These latter two were different from the earlier two. And one of them agreed and I was said he will be happy to do so only if he gets enough time to write up an article for me. I gave him full independence to select topic of his interest. The other one didn’t agree. Time constraint was the reason, I was said.

Anyways, I got the writeup from the first blogger yesterday night. So, this introduction now obviously means that I will be posting the article here without any edit as I like to give the author full independence to his creativity.

As you may have heard that Indiblogger people had organised a Blogger’s meet in Kolkata last Sunday (i.e.20th February,2011). The central theme was ‘Akshaya Patra‘, an NGO foundation. I will not go into further details about them, and will leave the responsibility to my guest blogger to do the justice.

So, according to Dr. Skeptic (as you know, my guest blogger for today),


“Akshaya Patra is an NGO with a vision. They have rightly made the diagnosis that the only way to get more students back into the schools is by making them win the debate of books vs bread.

In a nation where almost half the children of ages 5 years or lesser are suffering from some degree of malnutrition, hunger is a prime player in keeping children out of classrooms. This in turn, initiates a vicious cycle. Without a proper education behind them, these children grow up to be adults who are poorly equipped to work their way through their lives. They end up working as waged laborers or in other low paying, non-skill based professions which serve not to ameliorate their situation, but, actually worsens it. And the next generation follows in their footsteps just as their parents had: and the numbers of people stuck in this vicious cycle just keeps growing.

Akshaya Patra aims to end this by intervening in order to cut out the hunger for the children and make them return to the classes. Although the Government of India does have the Mid Day Meal scheme running, it does not do the nest job of monitoring the situation. Often the newspapers have headlines unearthing scams or poorly run mid day meal programs which are actually offsetting any of the advantages of the system. With Akshaya Patra, however, it is a different deal: they have a corporate demeanor which helps in creating a professional attitude about the way they go about doing their work.

Starting from clean and hygienic kitchens equipped with machinery to automate the production of food for thousands of children everyday, to custom made trucks to ferry the hot meals on wheels to the destinations everyday, it is a well thought out procedure. They are in collaboration with the University of Illinois in tracking the nutritional values of the food delivered as well.

Akshaya Patra is feeding 1.3 million children everyday. That is already a staggering number, but they plan to push it up to 5 million by 2020. They are doing this using a public private partnership model to augment and complement the mid day meal program run by the Government (and not as a substitution). They are also planning to open a kitchen in West Bengal this year some time around June-July in order to start their program for this state’s children as well. They plan to introduce the program in phases after starting off with 30,000 – 40,000 children first up.

I am in no way associated with the Akshaya Patra, but I believe that it is indeed a noble endeavor. I believe that many issues in our social, economic and medical facets can be solved if more and more children get a good and complete education. I am pretty skeptical about the NGOs that run programs parallel to the Government programs and end up hijacking the good work that is done by the state (since the behemoth of the state is not always the best at raking PR points from the work they do; at least not as much as the hungry NGOs). But Akshaya Patra appears to be of a different mettle. They have involved people of the stature of Mr. APJ Abdul Kalam and Dr. Narayan Murthy with their program.

I learnt of Akshaya Patra when I attended a bloggers’ convention sponsored by them and hosted by the vibrant Indiblogger platform. I believe it is our duty to spread the word and make their endeavor better known across the blogosphere.

Dr. Skeptic”

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