According to a 2005 HNP paper, Uttar Pradesh is one of the six states where one in two children is underweight and one of the four states that accounts for nearly forty three per cent of all underweight children in the country.
The Akshaya Patra Organization recognized the immediate need for assistance and launched the second arm of the mid-day meal programme in Vrindavan in August 2004. With a centralised and decentralised kitchen, the Vrindavan wing serves 1, 39,262 children and 1,874 schools located around the unit every day.
Following a strict regime of quality and hygiene practices, the team at the Vrindavan kitchen makes sure that they are equipped to produce delicious, fresh meals on a large scale. The kitchen even comes with a state of the art roti making machine that has the capacity to roll out up to 35,000 to 40,000 rotis in an hour.
As with each of the Akshaya Patra Foundation kitchens, every staff member at the Vrindavan kitchen follows carefully prescribed personal hygiene practices including daily showers, wearing clean uniforms, caps, masks, gloves, gumboots and other protective gear, along with hand santisation to make sure that only clean, fresh and healthy food passes its doors. The Vrindavan kitchen also has sixty nine custom- made vehicles to deliver the mid-day meals to each of the beneficiary schools.
The Vrindavan kitchen is always on the lookout for better practices, and ways to improve. Through Special Training Programmes (STP) the kitchen has set its eye on adopting ecofriendly initiatives in the future.
The Vrindavan kitchen has transformed the lives of many students across Uttar Pradesh. Ten year old Kumkum whose father was opposed to her going to school, today aspires to be either a teacher or an actress.
Akshaya Patra’s nutritious mid-day meals won over Kumkum’s father and turned her life around. Seven year old Rohit who first began to attend school only for the meal slowly found himself being drawn into school activities, games and friends. Today, he’s been attending school regularly for over two years and can even write his name in Hindi and English. There are many more inspiring stories of children whose progress mark the true success of the kitchen and the foundation’s cause.
The success of the Vrindavan kitchen has stirred the Akshaya Patra Organisation to add on four new feeding locations in the state, namely Kanpur, Agra, Lucknow and Varanasi, in the coming year. With word of its achievements spreading, and new kitchens opening up, the Akshaya Patra Foundation gets one step closer of realizing its dream everyday – to feed five million children by 2020.
Follow us: @AkshayaPatra on Twitter | TheAkshayapatraFoundation on Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment