AKSHAYPATRA

BUSINESS PROCESS AND STRUCTURE

GROUP 11
Submitted to- Chaitanayam
2016H149241
Dr. Anil Bhatt Maanik Goel 2016H149271
Madhurima Biswas 2016H149249
Prakarsh K. Agarwal 2016H149208
Introduction
Akshaypatra is a non-profit organization that was founded in the year
2000.The main motive of the organization was to fight hunger and
malnutrition in India. Lack of food availability children lacked behind in
studies as they were unable to concentrate in schools. The children
were dropping out of schools and underperformed in schools.

Vision- No Child should be deprived of education because

of hunger in India

With this vision in mind they introduced the system of mid-day meal
system in government and government aided schools. They wanted to
provide the children fresh, hot and nutritious balanced meal.

Since its foundation Akshaypatra has worked in the direction of

reaching more children with food on each school day.

Expansion of Akshaypatra
Bangalore
Started with feeding 1500 students in 5 schools in Bangalore.
In 6 months, request for food went from 5 schools to 3000
schools.
Started feeding 30,000 children after scaling up the services.
In 2003, it was feeding 43,000 students daily in Bangalore.

Other Parts of India

As the company recognized the need to provide midday meal in other
parts of the country, it expanded the program to other areas

In 2003, kitchen was opened in northern India in Vrindavan.

It began the program in Hubli-Dharwad in 2004 in collaboration
with Infosys Foundation.
A pilot program in 25 schools was also started in Jaipur,
Rajasthan to feed 5,200 children.

In rural regions as well, the need to feed the undernourished was

recognized as there were increased deaths due to starvation. One
such location was Baran district of Rajasthan where the program

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 was started as an experiment to feed the people in rural parts of the
country.

Strategy
Funding and Cost efficiency
Government subsidies, private and corporate donations.
Use of centralized and decentralized kitchens according to the
location.
Selection of school based on physical location.

Learning and Constant Improvement

Adjusting the machines to cut the vegetables according to
children after getting complains from schools of increased
wastage of vegetables.
Customization of delivery vehicles.
Change of suppliers to meet the quality standards set by the
organization.
Improvement in kitchen designs for comfort of workers.

Bangalore: A Centralized Approach

The kitchen established in Bangalore was designed by expert
engineers. As the operations grew in scale and scope, so did the design
of the kitchen. In 2007, it was feeding 145,000 children everyday
which initially started with 1500 students.

Challenges
Timely delivery of food to all the 486 schools from the centralized
kitchen.
Supply of raw materials for preparation of food contained large
amount of foreign particles like stones, nails etc. which required
extra input of labor for segregation.
Rice made available to them by government had low quality
which decreased nutrition value.
Change in regulations by the government which prevented to
exchange government-issued rice with market rice of higher
quality.

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Strategy to Tackling Challenges
Akshaypatra took early initiative to overcome the challenges faced by
them to provide the food to the children.

Hub and spoke system of delivery for of food using 22

customized vehicles.
Standardization of the system and training of workers to increase
efficiency and accuracy of operations.
Change in suppliers of raw materials for the preparation of food
for higher quality and nutrition efficient meals.

Akshyapatra also knew that providing same food everyday will lead to
monotonous behavior in students, so they provided variety of meals in
the schools.

Use of Technology
Cooking food for 145,000 students needs lots of human effort and time
as the quantity needed to be cooked was huge.

Automation and mechanization of processes solved the problem. Use

of boilers, cutting machines and holding vessels relieved the workers to
large extent. The use of machines improved the hygiene levels as the
human contact reduced with the prepared food. The sanitization of
kitchen with a system of hoses through hot water and steam reduced
time involved in these processes.

In Hubli, the use of technology was taken to one step further. They had
to serve even larger number of children. They used multi-story kitchen
to increase cost-efficiency and decrease manual efforts. They used
gravity for vegetables to be chopped, cleaned and sorted as they
passed from each floor of the kitchen.

Baran: A Decentralized approach

Akshaypatra made an effort to feed children in rural parts of the
country by starting its operations in Baran district of Rajasthan. In
2007, Akshyapatra served around 80 villages feeding 15,000 school
children per day.

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Challenges
Hygiene of the workers was the most important challenge faced
as they were local villagers with no proper hygiene standards.
Distribution of food to schools which were situated very far from
one another with less or no connection via roads.
Workers had no prior knowledge of the nutrition levels to be
present in the food prepared for the daily meals.
Uneducated and unskilled labor for performing basic tasks like
maintaining accounts, inventory, no knowledge of days in week
etc. posed a problem.
Lack of electricity and refrigeration in villages lead to spoilage of
vegetables and perishables.
Transportation of foods to schools in rainy season on unmetalled
road caused delays as trucks stuck in mud and ruts for days.

Tackling Challenges
Akshyapatra needed a whole new strategy to tackle the challenges
faced in Baran. So they came up with the decentralized operations
where kitchens were set up near to school or where the basic
infrastructure was available.

Training was provided to the workers regarding the basic

requirements of accounting, inventory maintenance etc.
Head cook was educated on the issue of procuring the
vegetables with longer shelf lives.
For maintaining hygiene, Akshaypatra advised a new
communication method telling workers that food prepared by
them first be offered to God. So the women started bathing daily
in order to bless the food.
Akshaypatra taught women workers to do different activities on
days to provide meal variety.

Delivery of food was made by the women on foot as the kitchens

were situated close to the schools as delivery through trucks was
not possible in every village.

Providing Helping hand

Collaboration with hospitals to provide medical assistance to
children consisting of dental, eye-care and stomach care.

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 Serving food to expecting mothers and infants in partnership
with municipal corporation to provide nutritious meals.
In Jaipur, providing meals to the low-skilled labor at extremely
low prices to break the vicious cycle of poverty.
Leveraged corporations and NGOs to sponsor the midday meal
programs or to start and expand such programs.

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