Akshaypatra: Business Structure and Process

AKSHAYPATRA
REPORT
Business Structure and Process
Submitted By- Maanik Goel
2016H149271
Introduction
With a vision to feed the underprivileged children of India Akshaypatra
was founded in 2002 to provide midday meals to such children. Due to
lack of nutrition rich food, the children were suffering from malnutrition
and were dropping out of schools, underperformed in academics and was
deprived of education.
With an initiative to feed the school children, Akshaypatra started its

midday meal program in Bangalore feeding 1,500 students in 5 schools.
With the success of the midday meal it had orders from 3,000 schools.
They scaled up their service to feed 30,000 students. In 2003, they were
feeding 43,000 students daily in Bangalore.
Expansion
Akshaypatra realized the need for the midday meals in other parts of the
country. They expanded their programs by opening a new kitchen in
Vrindavan in 2003.
In 2004, in collaboration with Infosys, they began providing meals in

Hubli-Dharwad.
By the end of 2004, they had pilot program running in 25 schools in
Jaipur feeding 5,200 children.
Apart from urban area, they started providing meals in rural areas
of Baran district in Rajasthan as there were increased deaths due to
starvation.
Growing both in rural and urban areas, Akshaypatra was feeding 567,622
children of 2000 schools by March 2007.
Funding
Akshaypatra knew they cannot achieve their vision of feeding children so
that they dont stay deprived of education without the help of funding
from the Government. So with the increasing growth of Akshaypatra,
government aided to their support with different subsidies and relaxations
in taxes and provided raw materials.
Apart from governments funding, there were corporate and individual
donors who came to fund the great cause. By March 2007, 16000 donors
were private donors who helped funding the cause across country.
Operation Strategy
Initially Akshaypatra started their operations in urban parts of the country
and later spread it to rural parts of the country. In urban parts it was easy
to use a centralized operations model which was more efficient. As they
moved to rural areas they shifted to decentralized model due its own
benefits and requirements of the program in rural India.
Bangalore: A Centralized Approach
Bangalore was a developed city with proper transportation and

connectivity of roads to the schools. The kitchen built here was designed
by expert engineers which initially served 1500 students and later with
modifications served 145,000 children daily.
Challenges
Timely delivery of meals in 486 schools for 145,000 children.

Poor quality of raw materials received from government.
Supply of raw materials from government subsidies contained lots of
foreign particles.
Overcoming Challenges
Use of extra labour clean the foreign particles from the government
supplied raw materials.
Exchanging the low quality rice with the high quality rice from the
market suppliers.
Using a hub and spoke system for the timely delivery of the meals
to all the schools on time.
To increase the efficiency of the kitchen they installed automated

machines to reduce the human efforts and the time required to produce
the meals on time. Use of machines not only helped in labour optimization
but also improved hygiene as it reduced the human contact with the final
prepared food.
Baran: A Decentralized Approach
Large population of India lives in rural parts of the country. Akshaypatra

started their operations to feed the undernourished children in rural parts
from Baran district of Rajasthan. Being rural part of country, road
connectivity of villages is very low.
Challenges
Due to low road connectivity, centralized approach was inefficient.

Hygiene standards of workers were very low.
Unskilled and undereducated labour posed a problem with
productivity of organization.
No prior knowledge of nutrition levels of meals to the workers.
Lack of electricity and refrigeration leads to spoilage of raw
materials which are perishable in nature.
Tackling Challenges
A decentralized approach was used to set up kitchen nearer to

schools for timely and systematic delivery.
Trainings of workers regarding nutrition levels of meals and hygiene
of the kitchens were held.
To tackle hygiene standards, they approached from different
perspective by telling workers to bless food before preparing meals.
They taught women workers to perform different activities on
different days to produce variety in meals.
They also taught head cook to buy food that had higher shelf life to
deal with the perishable raw materials problem.
Providing a Helping Hand

Collaborations with hospitals to provide medical care to the
students regarding eye care and dental care.
Providing food to the expecting mothers and nursing mothers and
infants to reduce the malnutrition levels.
Providing low cost meals to the labours to break the poverty cycle.
Asking collaboration of corporates and other NGOs to help start or
support the midday meal programs.
Success
Akshaypatra measured its success by the number of children fed by them.
Apart from that they measured their success by number of increased
enrolment of students in school and the improved academic performance
of the students.

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AKSHAYPATRA

With an initiative to feed the school children, Akshaypatra started its

In 2004, in collaboration with Infosys, they began providing meals in

Bangalore: A Centralized Approach

Bangalore was a developed city with proper transportation and

Timely delivery of meals in 486 schools for 145,000 children.

To increase the efficiency of the kitchen they installed automated

Baran: A Decentralized Approach

Large population of India lives in rural parts of the country. Akshaypatra

Due to low road connectivity, centralized approach was inefficient.

A decentralized approach was used to set up kitchen nearer to

Providing a Helping Hand

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