When hunger for learning is stoked by a free lunch

New Delhi: Shamvir Singh says he downs a glass of milk before walking to school, but when asked what else he eats at home, the 12-year-old droops his head in silence.

He is embarrassed, but none of the other students who are crowded around him in the dusty junior high school courtyard tease him. Half of them, estimates the principal, only get one meal a day: the free hot lunch offered at schools around the country.

"Children from very poor farming families now come regularly; they look forward to the meal," said Shiv Singh, the headmaster of the Shri Krishak school in Beri, a village three hours south of New Delhi. "They used to go off to help their parents farm."

Innovative programme

The Indian government provides free hot lunches to 120 million students a day, the largest school lunch programme in the world. For comparison, the United States provided low-cost or free lunches to some 31 million children each school day in 2009. The massive undertaking started as a flawed welfare programme that has been improved with the help of a group teaming up with some of India's top engineers.

Reforms by the group, the Akshaya Patra Foundation, are expanding school attendance, cutting down on hunger, and, anecdotally, blurring caste divisions.

Some of their innovations in food processing also hint at the potential for adding value to India's bountiful crops in ways that serve the poor who grow them.

Initially, under the national mid-day meal programme, free grain was distributed to parents and schoolchildren were sent home for lunch. The problem: Many families sold the grain and the children went hungry.

That was the case in Berii. Headmaster Singh points to one of the eldest girls. "She returned late to school every day and when asked why, she said, ‘There was no food'."

In 2000, a group of people in Bangalore noticed the problem. They began to take the rations and deliver a daily cooked meal to a few local schools, building on a Hindu tradition of serving meals for the poor. Soon the group received letters from other schools wanting to be included. Within months the requests totalled 100,000.

Mechanised kitchens

"We were shocked," said Suvyakta Das, a president of Akshaya Patra, a secular foundation that promotes charity work.

"We didn't realise the scale of this issue in Bangalore."

They would soon learn the scale of the issue nationwide, but for the moment the question was how to cook 100,000 lunches a day? "Everybody said, ‘This scale? Sorry'," says Das. However Das — who graduated from a top engineering university in India — along with other engineer in the group designed "centralised kitchens" capable of churning out more than 100,000 lunches every morning.

The kitchen managed by Das in Vrindivan, a town near Beri, opens at 2am, and by 9am the food is on trucks headed to 1,500 nearby schools. Mostly this is done by machine, requiring just 65 workers. One machine can churn out 40,000 rotis — a circular flat bread — an hour.

With the help of the kitchens, Akshaya Patra now feeds 1.2 million children a day. An impact assessment by ACNielsen found the programme has succeeded in raising school enrollments in various regions, some by as much as 15.3 per cent. Attendance also jumped in some places by more than 10 per cent.

In 2001, noting Akshaya Patra's success, India's Supreme Court ordered the government to provide hot lunches nationwide — a mandate only widely implemented in recent years.