Indian Engineers Build A Stronger Society With School Lunch Program

Hide caption The Akshaya Patra Foundation, a nonprofit based in Bangalore, partners with the government to make close to 1.3 million nutritious meals a day for schoolchildren throughout India. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption One of Akshaya Patra's kitchens, just outside Bangalore, churns out an average of 17,000 pounds of rice and 4,500 gallons of lentil soup every school day. A kitchen overseer checks in on the food preparation in the early morning. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption The giant kitchen is designed and run by engineers, who are passionate about efficiency and hygiene. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption Rice falls down a chute (top left) and is packed into sterilized stainless steel vessels for delivery to schools. Over time, Akshaya Patra has learned what children like in different regions and has customized the kitchen according to the local palate. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption A workman holds a fuel briquette made from sugarcane waste, seed waste and peanuts. The briquette powers the kitchen's boilers. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption Freshly cooked food is packed in stainless steel containers before being transported to various schools in custom-built vehicles. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption A workman closes the door of an Akshaya Patra truck filled with fresh school lunches. Some 34 trucks head out from this kitchen every school day, providing lunch for nearly 150,000 children in the Bangalore area. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption Many malnourished students have benefitted from the Akshaya Patra school lunch program. Bangalore middle school student K. Suchitra (center), 13, often comes to school with an empty stomach, but she knows she'll eat at school and can have as many servings as she wants. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption The school lunch program customizes the menu in different parts of the country to local preferences. At this middle school in Bangalore, lunch often consists of a South Indian meal of rice and vegetable-lentil soup. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR

Hide caption Akshaya Patra's daily meals keep dropout rates low and provide many parents, who cannot afford to feed their kids adequately, a reason to send them to school, the foundation's executive director, Shridhar Venkat, says. Previous Next Ryan Lobo for NPR 1 of 10 i View slideshow

At a government-run public middle school in Bangalore, the blackboard's cracking, the textbooks are tattered and most of the students are barefoot.

But with all those challenges, the biggest obstacle that teachers face in keeping kids in school is hunger. Many students show up at school having had nothing to eat for breakfast.

On mornings one student comes to school hungry, the thought of school makes her break down, she says.

"When I had to get on the bus, I would start crying," says K. Suchitra, 13.

Suchitra is an unusually talented student, says her teacher, Sheelavati Shakti. She shows a strong aptitude for music and dance, and is strong academically.

But when she joined this school a year ago, Suchitra looked unhealthy, Shakti says. Her skin was discolored, but she didn't have an infection; she was just malnourished.

Suchitra's life has recently been turned around, however. An ambitious school lunch program now supplies kids at her middle school with a nutritious, freshly cooked meal. On days she comes to school hungry, she knows she can eat at school.

"After eating this food I've become stronger," Suchitra says. "That's why I'm able to come to school and study and play."

The skin discoloration disappeared after she started the lunch program, Suchitra says. But the program has done more than improve her physical health; it's allowed her to dream of a better life. She now imagines going to college to study science. And one day, she says, she hopes to become a software engineer.

The lunch program that provides meals to Suchitra's school currently feeds 1.3 million children across India, making it one of the largest school lunch programs in the world.

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It was initially begun more than a decade ago as part of the religious outreach of a Hindu group known as ISKCON, better known in the West as the Hare Krishna movement.

The Hindu group is still actively involved in the program. But the lunch program is now operated as a secular, public-private partnership, serving poor children of all backgrounds.

Government officials supply grain and other lunch ingredients at a discount, and provide a cash subsidy. Donors from India and around the world supply the rest.

"Feeding a child is not charity," says Shridhar Venkat, who directs the lunch program through the Akshaya Patra Foundation. He used to be a corporate executive. To him, a child like Suchitra is not a hungry 13-year-old girl in poverty. She's an opportunity, and giving her lunch is an investment. Tomorrow, an educated Suchitra could produce a huge return on that investment to her community, he said.

The program prepares most of the food using centralized kitchens. Some 17,000 pounds of rice and 4,500 gallons of soup are produced by one kitchen in Bangalore. Engineers have designed the kitchen and the logistics of delivering the food to schools.

"We have never failed to deliver a meal on any day in the last 11 years," Venkat says.

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The program is so cost-effective it's become a Harvard Business School case study. Today it costs only about 11 cents to place a meal before each child. By 2020, the program hopes to feed 5 million children every day.

The combination of efficiency and high purpose makes for a strange marriage: ruthlessly efficient corporate management techniques married to a goal that is deeply emotional.

"We want to do things with heart," Venkat says. "It's not just, 'build large kitchens.' All these large kitchens have a big heart."

Venkat is constantly looking for ways to increase efficiency so the program can feed more children. He studies the data to see if the lunch program is having a discernible effect. He's recently noticed more children are coming to school on one particular day each week: the day the lunch program includes dessert.

Venkat said he was going to try to use the inducement of dessert to get kids to come to school. Typically, the children know on which day dessert is going to be included in lunch.

"We are trying to make it a secret, so they keep guessing and they come to school," he says with a laugh.

Independent audits of the program have found it's having a profound effect.

"The school attendance goes up, malnutrition level comes down, dropout rates comes down," Venkat says.

But besides the statistics, Venkat says he regularly sees the human face of the results.

A young man recently visited Venkat. He was in one of the earliest cohorts of children who've been helped by the lunch program.

The man told Venkat he was the son of a security guard. When the son was in the eighth grade, his father was earning less than a dollar a day. He was so hungry, he used to faint at school. Academically, he was scraping by. Then, the free lunch program started.

"He told me, 'My attention span went up. My concentration went up,'" Venkat says. So did the boy's grades. He went on to college and became an engineer. When the young man visited Venkat, he handed him an envelope.

"And the envelope ... had an offer letter from India's leading multinational software company as a software programmer," Venkat says.