Food for Education
Supporting the Akshaya Patra Foundation (Food for Education) initiative in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
The Motwani Jadeja Foundation is proud to support the Akshaya Patra Foundation’s initiative, the Ahmedabad kitchen. MJF will be helping the organization buy kitchen equipment to feed school children who would otherwise go hungry.
This initiative is part of Akshaya Patra Foundation’s huge effort to eliminate classroom hunger in India by implementing the Mid-Day Meal Scheme in government schools and government-aided schools. The foundation is striving to counter malnutrition and to support the right to education of socio-economically disadvantaged children—aiming for a future that is food secure and equitable. The organization is committed to unlocking children and their families from the vicious and perpetual cycle of poverty. They now operate one of the largest NGO-run midday school meal programs in the world and currently prepare and deliver healthy lunches for 1.8 million school children in India every day.
Since 2000, Akshaya Patra has been concerting all its efforts towards providing fresh and nutritious meals to children on every single school day. They are continuously leveraging technology to multiply their reach. The state-of-the-art kitchens have become a subject of study and have attracted visitors from around the world. MJF’s donation will help the foundation buy important kitchen equipment for its Ahmedabad kitchen, which was opened in 2014.
The kitchen, constructed across three levels, and spread over two acres is one of the largest kitchen in the country. Constructed on the gravity flow system, the Ahmedabad kitchen has replaced the Akshaya Patra kitchen in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Equipped with a roti (Indian flat bread) making machine that can churn out up to 60,000 rotis an hour, as well as boilers, rice cleaning machines, rice and dal silos, cold storage and more, this kitchen can produce up to 200,000 meals in five hours. The kitchen is also fitted with a full-scale bakery to produce wheat-based food to the young school children.
On every school day, 4.5 tonnes of rice, 8 tonnes of vegetable and 3 tonnes of dal will be cooked and loaded into 44 custom designed meal distribution vehicles and delivered to 121,508 children in 666 schools across Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad districts.
As well as sponsoring the Ahmedabad kitchen, Asha Jadeja will be participating in an online panel run by TAPForum, as part of her continued work with Akshaya Patra. Organized by the foundation in order to extend their reach and develop the conversation around philanthropy and child malnutrition and poverty, TAPForums bring together innovators and thought leaders from public, private and civil society sectors to align, act and invest to solve some of the most pressing challenges in India including classroom hunger.
TAPForums are a platform to enable global dialogue and action with three key objectives:
- Link together in collaboration
- Leverage knowledge, knowhow and resources to enrich lives
- Learn from each other to bring transformative change
Asha Jadeja is delighted to be involved in such an important cause, and to speak about these issues and how we can help solve them going forward.
“Akshay Patra is one of those rare initiatives that emerges once in a century from the hearts and minds of brilliant problem solvers. When a bunch of Hare Krishna engineers decided to design and create machinery that could churn out meals for school kids, little did they know that they would be feeding millions and helping them stay in school for critical years. I am humbled to be a partner in this beautiful journey.” Asha Jadeja