Half of the world’s hungry live in India, and a majority of them are children. The challenge for us in the country has been how to make sure these children stop going to bed hungry day after day.

India’s Response

Logistically, the problem was tackled through government schools in India that educate 60 per cent of the country’s children, and most of them come from below poverty-line background (the family earns less than Rs 700 a month).

With parents (often single) going off for wage labour early in the morning, the children usually come to school hungry because kitchen fires at home are only lit in the evenings after the father or the mother brings home the daily wage. 

What the Government of India did to address this, is launch the Midday Meal programme. It is designed to provide every child enrolled in a government school, nutritiously cooked afternoon meal every day. The meal not only fights hunger, it brings a hungry child’s attention back to the lessons, and it also encourages children out of school to enroll so they can at least be assured of one wholesome meal every day.

The midday meal programme is a well-intentioned programme, one that has been lauded all over the country, and the Supreme Court of India has even passed an order in 2001 instructing all the states in the country to provide the midday meal to all government school going children. But the implementation of the programme has run into rough weather.

The problem is

For urban India. Schools in rural areas have, after many trials and errors, begun to get their meals cooked fresh within the premises at a safe spot. The food is cooked by the village self help groups and the quality of the food is consistent as more often than not it is the mothers of the children themselves (they are members of the self help group) who cook the meal.

Urban India faces a problem. Schools in cities are often compact, congested structures with no place to cook, and the ever-present hazard of a fire is a huge deterrent. Secondly, cities and towns have no established networks of self-help groups, so who will cook? And finally the question of how to ensure quality meals reach thousands of children day after day when the lunch bell rings?

The Urban solution to the midday meal problem was in a new public private partnership, one that Naandi’s demonstrated by creating for the State Government of Andhra Pradesh probably the world’s largest Central Kitchen in Hyderabad, and an electronically mapped distribution channel that ensured hot, tasty meals reached hungry children everyday without fail.

How the Public Private partnership works

The State government gives the land and provides cereals from the Food corporation of India godowns along with a minimum recurring cost per child per meal.

Necessary equipment and technology that will cook, pack and distribute tens of thousands of meals every day with utmost care for quality, nutrition and hygiene is purchased for the kitchen by Naandi by raising resources from individuals, corporates and philanthropists such as you.