Our Origin Story
One day, while looking out of his window in the village of Mayapur near Kolkata, Srila Prabhupada - the founder of the Hare Krishna movement - witnessed a group of children fighting with stray dogs over scraps of food. Deeply moved by this heartbreaking scene, he resolved that nobody within a ten-mile radius of his centre would ever go hungry again.
This conviction - that no-one, especially children, should endure a day without a meal - became a powerful exhortation for Prabhupada's followers everywhere, including in Bengaluru where The Akshaya Patra Foundation was born.
In the year 2000, under the leadership of our founders Madhu Pandit Dasa and Chanchalapathi Dasa, Akshaya Patra began by feeding 1,500 children at five schools in Bengaluru, Karnataka.
Akshaya Patra Today
Today, Akshaya Patra operates the world's largest mid-day school meal program through a public-private partnership with the Indian government. Every day, we provide nutritious vegetarian meals to over 2 million children across 24,000 schools in India, all prepared in more than 70 state-of-the-art kitchens. Thanks to our focus on efficiency, it costs just SGD 23.5 to feed one child for an entire year.
History
24 Years of Service
- Our first kitchen starts feeding 1500 children from 5 schools in Bengaluru
- Our roti making machines, made in house, mark a huge technological milestone, allowing us to make 40,000 rotis per day
- The largest mega kitchen in Asia is set up for Akshaya Patra in collaboration with the Infosys Foundation
- Harvard Business School and AC Nielsen conduct research into Akshaya Patra's Mid Day Meal program, finding significant improvement in attendance and enrolment since the commencement of the initiative
- We pass the milestone of serving 500 million meals, and receive an award for Innovations in Services for Urban Poor award by the World Bank
- Akshaya Patra is recognised in the Limca Book of Records as the 'World's Largest School Meal Programme'
- We receive a letter of appreciation from the then U.S. President-elect, Mr Barack Obama and cross our billionth cumulative meal served
- Humanitarian relief-feeding work is conducted for those affected by the Nepal earthquake
- Milestones of 2 billion and 3 billion meals served respectively are crossed
- Akshaya Patra provides humanitarian food relief aid during Kerala floods and during the Covid 19 pandemic, in the form of cooked meals and relief kits, serving over 244 million cumulative meals
4 billion cumulative meals' milestone receives global recognition at the United Nations HQ in New York
