Akshaya Patra

Akshaya Patra

Unlimited food for education

In partnership with Infosys foundation

Mystical objects have always been a part of Indian mythological stories. How thrilled would you be to witness one such object up-close? ISBR College made it possible by organizing a visit to ISKON Akshaya Patra on 21.07.2017; faculty Mr. V V Rao accompanied the students.

 Akshaya Patra was handed over to the pious pandavas by sun god during their 13 year exile to provide them with inexhaustible amount of food. It has now travelled through time and has entered the present to facilitate the same noble objective of vanquishing hunger. ISKON has taken this initiative since 2000 and is operating as an NGO; their primary focus is to provide mid-day meal for poor children studying in government schools.

It is an obvious question what are we to learn from this? The answer is simple, a lot of things! In 2000, 1500 meals were dispatched and by 2017 its 95000 a day!! If this doesn’t get you up your feet here is another fact that is sure to exhilarate you. Every day the usage of provisions are – 8 tons of rice, 5 tons of vegetables (mixed vegetables), 1.82 tons of sambar, all these are cooked in less than 5 hours.

As managements students it’s essential to understand how such humongous units are managed in an untarnished manner for years. After having visited the temple we headed to the production unit of akshaya patra. We were divided into a batch of 3 consisting 20 students each, strictly instructed to wear head cover and slippers that they provided as hygiene was their first priority. Our watches, pens, bangles and any objects that could fall were to be put aside. Here Mr. Subhash walked us through the entire kitchen. There are 275 employees working in kitchen and 55 of them are cooking staff who comes during midnight to start cooking. There are separate rooms where rice, vegetables and sambar are prepared. Rice preparation is done batch wise, where each container has 600 liters of capacity and can prepare 120 kg of rice in 15-20 min. at more than 90 degree centigrade which is monitored by the supervisor.  

Steam is used for cooking; once the rice is cooked the remaining starch present in the rice is filtered out by the strainer inside the container. Once the filtration is done the cooked rice is unloaded into the trolleys. There is a big annapatra where the rice is spread to avoid clustering of the grains. Now for packaging there is a sterilized container in which the cooked rice is packed manually which keeps it hot for 6 hours.

Then we moved to another room where vegetables are prepared for chopping. Especially this work is assigned to women. Here we have two different type of vegetable cutting marching in which soft and hard vegetable gets cut. Soft vegetable like beans, carrot, radish etc. are cut in one machine in specific size and shape. Similarly hard vegetables like drumstick are cut in another machine. The vegetables in Akshaya Patra are imported from Hassan district of Karnataka. In the room where sambar is prepared the container has a capacity of 1200 litres. After the preparation, the sambar is unloaded in another container where that is stirred and packed into the box. Later during the day we all assemble in an open area where we had questionnaire with the unit manager of Akshaya Patra. Few questions asked were:-