The Innovation for India Awards are
given across Business, Social and Public Service categories, and the
most deserving innovations are marked by simplified processes, low
costs, sustainability and transformational impact. Mr. Nandan Nilekani
keynoted this year’s award presentation.
The winners were selected on three basic
criteria: sustainability, an innovation that is likely to endure for a
long time; uniqueness, an innovation that is doing something different
and one of a kind; and impact, an innovation that is creating a
significant social impact. Akshaya Patra met all three criteria and
placed 1st out of 145 contestants in the Social category for its
innovative mechanized kitchens and different kitchen models that cater
to urban and rural schools. These uniquely designed kitchens enable the
foundation to provide hot nourishing food to over 1.3 million children
daily, across 10 states of India, from 21 kitchens.
Started modestly in Bangalore feeding
1500 children in 5 schools, the Akshaya Patra Foundation is one of the
world’s largest NGO-run midday meal programs. A public-private
partnership, Akshaya Patra combines good management, innovative
technology and smart engineering to deliver school lunch at a fraction
of the cost of similar programs in other parts of the world. It costs
Akshaya Patra only $15 to feed a child for an entire year. This meal
gives these children an incentive to come to school, stay in school and
provides them with the necessary nutrients they need to develop their
cognitive abilities and focus on learning.
The mechanized kitchen models are not
the only area where Akshaya Patra has excelled in innovation. The
foundation has successfully combined the execution excellence of the
for-profit sector with the deep compassion of the non-profit sector to
design solutions that are helping the most vulnerable segments of the
Indian society. Not only do they continually institute improvements in
the kitchens to increase efficiency and scale as well as work on the
supply chain to manage procurement and inventory but they have also
implemented Six Sigma business practices to improve the quality of
process outputs as well as Enterprise Resource Planning to help ensure
their costs remain low.
In a short time, the Akshaya Patra
Foundation has grown to become the largest, and certainly most
innovative, school lunch program in the world. Their next milestone is
to serve 5 million children daily by 2020.
