[Music]
one Sunday morning
in the year 2002 gentleman walked into
our temple one was Mohandas pi director
finance of Infosys technologies and his
close friend from school days of hygiene
and they talked to us about the temple
that we had just been inaugurated about
three years ago and the large number of
people who were coming to the temple and
they said that large number of people
are coming and you’re feeding all the
people who come to the temple and they
exceeded a thought if we can also be
involved in certain social development
activities they talked about a few
things like distributing sewing machines
to women and computer training to young
people and all of those kind of things
and they also talked about the mid-day
meal program of Tamil Nadu and they said
Swamiji think over we will come back
after a few weeks so they were important
people so we had to have something to
tell them after a few weeks at that time
we reflected on an interesting anecdote
in the life of srila prabhupada the
founder acharya of ISKCON somewhere in
the 1970s he was opening a temple of
Krishna in some part of the country on
that particular day of inauguration of
the temple large number of guests had
come hundreds and thousands and a big
feast was served to all of them and
after the feast Sheela Prabhupada was in
his room talking to a few guests with
him suddenly he heard children screaming
and dogs barking he walked up to the
window and he saw their poor village
children shooing away dogs to get a
morsel of food among the leaf plates
that was true in there after the feasts
shrila prabhupada was a very
compassionate person he felt strongly
for the pain of others there were tears
in his eyes he called the leaders of his
con at that time and he said we have
inaugurated a temple of Krishna here we
have invited Krishna here Krishna is the
father of everyone
where there is father the children
should not be hungry at that time he
gave a mandate no one shall should go
hungry in a ten-mile radius of a temple
especially children inspired by these
anecdotes and a few other instructions
of his we quickly started the mid-day
meal program feeding about 1,500
children in five schools in Bangalore on
the outskirts of Bangalore City but then
the nature of our country we are a very
big country with a big population and
big problems and if you want to create
any impact the most important thing is
to scale up the program or else we are
barely scratching the surface of the
problem and that’s how we kept expanding
our program going to different places
and today we are serving 17 lakh
children every day in 12 states of the
and to scale up to this degree we had to
use technology in the last 18 years we
have developed a kind of a
specialization where we can set up large
kitchen infrastructure like this which
can prepare meals for about 25,000
children or 50,000 children or even one
lakh children we have large cauldrons
specially made for our requirement to
cook rice for about 1,000 students in
under 15 minutes and the entire handling
is done in such a hygienic manner to
ensure food safety and hygiene I have a
small video clip of the rice cooking
section in our kitchen in Jaipur we use
industrial steam generators that
accelerates the cooking process and
these cauldrons also have a gear
mechanism by which it tilts and the rice
is emptied into a stainless steel
trolley and from the trolley into a
large stainless steel tank and from the
tank into the container that actually
goes to the school so you can see that
there is very minimum human touch and
handling to ensure high degree of food
safety we also have large cauldrons like
this to prepare sambar dal for about
6,000 students in two hours actually you
cannot make out from this image the
cauldrons are fairly big about two
people can get into it of course we
don’t let anyone get in and it was
relatively easy in South India to manage
rice sambar and curds and when we went
to the north we had to provide chapatis
or rotis the we went around and found
that there’s something that was closest
to roti making was popper making machine
and they were making about 3000 puppets
per hour but you know roti and puppets
are not the same so the inverse
stood in three different manufacturers
of these roti machines papad machines to
mock to modify it to make them into roti
making machines two of them failed one
succeeded and he made a machine that was
able to make 10,000 rotis per hour in
the next few years we further modified
and worked on it improved on it and we
now have a machine that can make 40,000
rotis per hour I’ll show you a small
video clip of the roti making machine in
Vrindavan Mathura Uttar Pradesh this is
the wheat flour kneading machine and
this also has a tilting mechanism and
the dough is fed into the hopper of the
machine there are a series of rollers
and between these rollers it is pressed
and comes out like a thick fabric and
then it is die-cut and transferred onto
a heated metal conveyor and then it gets
cooked on one side it flips over to your
second conveyer and gets cooked on the
second side and there is a third mesh
conveyor where it directly comes in
contact with fire and puffs up just like
the rotis and the full cast that our
mothers make the unused portion of the
dough is fed back into the hopper of the
machine and it is reused this machine
was specially made for our requirement
it is about 30 feet long and at the far
end of the machine you can see women
collecting the hot rotis and to keep
them soft and also to make them tasty we
also apply oil and in our new machine we
have an automatic oil sprinkler these
rotis are put into the container and
they are vade and now they are ready to
be taken to the schools they come out of
the kitchen to the loading bay we also
have conveyor belts and different kinds
of things like this because we have to
handle a large quantity of food in a
short time
and these vessels are carried in these
kind of custom-built vehicles to take
them to the school in a radius of about
25 kilometers all over the country we
have a fleet of about 600 class vehicles
some of them smaller than this some of
them even bigger than this depending on
the road conditions to ensure children
have a good healthy nutritious and tasty
meal every day the impact of the program
has been multifold and one important
impact is that to reduce classroom
hunger we consider this as a very
strategic intervention the government is
actually spending crores of rupees on
infrastructure uniform textbooks
universe salaries of the teachers and if
the after all that expense if the child
comes to the classroom and the child is
hungry he will not have a learning
experience so a small investment in the
form of a meal makes all of the other
investment the government is making more
productive so this is the first impact
and the second impact is that teachers
don’t have to worry about the meal
program and they can focus on the
academics school enrolment has gone up
as a result of this program school
attendance has improved dropout rate in
classes have come down classroom
performance has improved and the
nutritional status of the students has
also improved in fact in the last few
years we have recognised another
important dimension of impact and
engagement this program has been having
we call it the dream project basically
this is to look for dreamers among these
children who come from underprivileged
families and to mentor them we came
across one girl in a school in Bangalore
his father was a driver in a public
transport company and while she watched
in her house or while she was riding her
bicycle to the school she had developed
an aspiration to become an actress so we
tied up with Bangalore School of Speech
and Drama and mentored her so that she
can perform already she has given a few
performances and we shall continue to
mentor her till she achieves her dream
[Applause]
we came across another boy son of
construction workers and he also had an
unusual dream that he wanted to become a
chef so we tied up with Taj B vanta and
for the first time he entered a star
hotel and the executive chef there soon
acquainted him with the kitchen and in a
few weeks of training he became a quite
a confident chef and now Todd School of
Hotel Management has offered him
admission already and they have they are
very confident that we can groom him to
become a world-class chef we have also
tied up with a robotics company in
Bangalore and they went around to some
of the schools government schools and
they got the children excited about
robotics and new technologies like that
and you can see the children and the
brightness on their face so basically we
want to identify hundreds and thousands
of dreamers all over the country and
mentor them last year we identified
hundred this year we are going to do
three hundred all over the country now
in other words Akshaya Patra is not just
filling bellies with food but actually
fuelling the dreams of these children in
order to involve young people like you
and in colleges and in corporates and
business houses we have created another
initiate
called IKEA a youth social development
initiative where young people like you
can spend time with these children
actually we have realized children all
over the country they are very very
talented it is just that they don’t have
the right ecosystem they don’t have the
right kind of opportunities to blossom
so we want to create these kind of
opportunities and mentor them inspire
them teach them English so that they
will be more self-confident remember if
there is a car driver who can speak in
English language he will get much more
salary than a car driver who cannot
speak English language so inspire them
and equip them with a few skills and
also with some other activities
entertainment and other things so that
they become more inspired in their lives
so this is the purpose of IKEA to ignite
inspire and motivate children to unravel
the talents in them in conclusion the
vision of Akshaya Patra is no child in
India shall be deprived of Education
because of hunger today we are serving
17 lakhs children every day in about
fourteen thousand class government
schools our aspiration is to touch 50
lakh children every day we have an even
bigger aspiration and that is in a few
years from now we look forward for a day
when we can close down except etre
because all the children can be our
country will be free from poverty all
the parents can take care of their
children so that we don’t need to exist
so in other words we don’t want to be a
self-serving
program and organization thriving on and
celebrating the miseries of our country
but we want to celebrate the joy and
happiness in our country thank you very much
one Sunday morning
in the year 2002 gentleman walked into
our temple one was Mohandas pi director
finance of Infosys technologies and his
close friend from school days of hygiene
and they talked to us about the temple
that we had just been inaugurated about
three years ago and the large number of
people who were coming to the temple and
they said that large number of people
are coming and you’re feeding all the
people who come to the temple and they
exceeded a thought if we can also be
involved in certain social development
activities they talked about a few
things like distributing sewing machines
to women and computer training to young
people and all of those kind of things
and they also talked about the mid-day
meal program of Tamil Nadu and they said
Swamiji think over we will come back
after a few weeks so they were important
people so we had to have something to
tell them after a few weeks at that time
we reflected on an interesting anecdote
in the life of srila prabhupada the
founder acharya of ISKCON somewhere in
the 1970s he was opening a temple of
Krishna in some part of the country on
that particular day of inauguration of
the temple large number of guests had
come hundreds and thousands and a big
feast was served to all of them and
after the feast Sheela Prabhupada was in
his room talking to a few guests with
him suddenly he heard children screaming
and dogs barking he walked up to the
window and he saw their poor village
children shooing away dogs to get a
morsel of food among the leaf plates
that was true in there after the feasts
shrila prabhupada was a very
compassionate person he felt strongly
for the pain of others there were tears
in his eyes he called the leaders of his
con at that time and he said we have
inaugurated a temple of Krishna here we
have invited Krishna here Krishna is the
father of everyone
where there is father the children
should not be hungry at that time he
gave a mandate no one shall should go
hungry in a ten-mile radius of a temple
especially children inspired by these
anecdotes and a few other instructions
of his we quickly started the mid-day
meal program feeding about 1,500
children in five schools in Bangalore on
the outskirts of Bangalore City but then
the nature of our country we are a very
big country with a big population and
big problems and if you want to create
any impact the most important thing is
to scale up the program or else we are
barely scratching the surface of the
problem and that’s how we kept expanding
our program going to different places
and today we are serving 17 lakh
children every day in 12 states of the
and to scale up to this degree we had to
use technology in the last 18 years we
have developed a kind of a
specialization where we can set up large
kitchen infrastructure like this which
can prepare meals for about 25,000
children or 50,000 children or even one
lakh children we have large cauldrons
specially made for our requirement to
cook rice for about 1,000 students in
under 15 minutes and the entire handling
is done in such a hygienic manner to
ensure food safety and hygiene I have a
small video clip of the rice cooking
section in our kitchen in Jaipur we use
industrial steam generators that
accelerates the cooking process and
these cauldrons also have a gear
mechanism by which it tilts and the rice
is emptied into a stainless steel
trolley and from the trolley into a
large stainless steel tank and from the
tank into the container that actually
goes to the school so you can see that
there is very minimum human touch and
handling to ensure high degree of food
safety we also have large cauldrons like
this to prepare sambar dal for about
6,000 students in two hours actually you
cannot make out from this image the
cauldrons are fairly big about two
people can get into it of course we
don’t let anyone get in and it was
relatively easy in South India to manage
rice sambar and curds and when we went
to the north we had to provide chapatis
or rotis the we went around and found
that there’s something that was closest
to roti making was popper making machine
and they were making about 3000 puppets
per hour but you know roti and puppets
are not the same so the inverse
stood in three different manufacturers
of these roti machines papad machines to
mock to modify it to make them into roti
making machines two of them failed one
succeeded and he made a machine that was
able to make 10,000 rotis per hour in
the next few years we further modified
and worked on it improved on it and we
now have a machine that can make 40,000
rotis per hour I’ll show you a small
video clip of the roti making machine in
Vrindavan Mathura Uttar Pradesh this is
the wheat flour kneading machine and
this also has a tilting mechanism and
the dough is fed into the hopper of the
machine there are a series of rollers
and between these rollers it is pressed
and comes out like a thick fabric and
then it is die-cut and transferred onto
a heated metal conveyor and then it gets
cooked on one side it flips over to your
second conveyer and gets cooked on the
second side and there is a third mesh
conveyor where it directly comes in
contact with fire and puffs up just like
the rotis and the full cast that our
mothers make the unused portion of the
dough is fed back into the hopper of the
machine and it is reused this machine
was specially made for our requirement
it is about 30 feet long and at the far
end of the machine you can see women
collecting the hot rotis and to keep
them soft and also to make them tasty we
also apply oil and in our new machine we
have an automatic oil sprinkler these
rotis are put into the container and
they are vade and now they are ready to
be taken to the schools they come out of
the kitchen to the loading bay we also
have conveyor belts and different kinds
of things like this because we have to
handle a large quantity of food in a
short time
and these vessels are carried in these
kind of custom-built vehicles to take
them to the school in a radius of about
25 kilometers all over the country we
have a fleet of about 600 class vehicles
some of them smaller than this some of
them even bigger than this depending on
the road conditions to ensure children
have a good healthy nutritious and tasty
meal every day the impact of the program
has been multifold and one important
impact is that to reduce classroom
hunger we consider this as a very
strategic intervention the government is
actually spending crores of rupees on
infrastructure uniform textbooks
universe salaries of the teachers and if
the after all that expense if the child
comes to the classroom and the child is
hungry he will not have a learning
experience so a small investment in the
form of a meal makes all of the other
investment the government is making more
productive so this is the first impact
and the second impact is that teachers
don’t have to worry about the meal
program and they can focus on the
academics school enrolment has gone up
as a result of this program school
attendance has improved dropout rate in
classes have come down classroom
performance has improved and the
nutritional status of the students has
also improved in fact in the last few
years we have recognised another
important dimension of impact and
engagement this program has been having
we call it the dream project basically
this is to look for dreamers among these
children who come from underprivileged
families and to mentor them we came
across one girl in a school in Bangalore
his father was a driver in a public
transport company and while she watched
in her house or while she was riding her
bicycle to the school she had developed
an aspiration to become an actress so we
tied up with Bangalore School of Speech
and Drama and mentored her so that she
can perform already she has given a few
performances and we shall continue to
mentor her till she achieves her dream
[Applause]
we came across another boy son of
construction workers and he also had an
unusual dream that he wanted to become a
chef so we tied up with Taj B vanta and
for the first time he entered a star
hotel and the executive chef there soon
acquainted him with the kitchen and in a
few weeks of training he became a quite
a confident chef and now Todd School of
Hotel Management has offered him
admission already and they have they are
very confident that we can groom him to
become a world-class chef we have also
tied up with a robotics company in
Bangalore and they went around to some
of the schools government schools and
they got the children excited about
robotics and new technologies like that
and you can see the children and the
brightness on their face so basically we
want to identify hundreds and thousands
of dreamers all over the country and
mentor them last year we identified
hundred this year we are going to do
three hundred all over the country now
in other words Akshaya Patra is not just
filling bellies with food but actually
fuelling the dreams of these children in
order to involve young people like you
and in colleges and in corporates and
business houses we have created another
initiate
called IKEA a youth social development
initiative where young people like you
can spend time with these children
actually we have realized children all
over the country they are very very
talented it is just that they don’t have
the right ecosystem they don’t have the
right kind of opportunities to blossom
so we want to create these kind of
opportunities and mentor them inspire
them teach them English so that they
will be more self-confident remember if
there is a car driver who can speak in
English language he will get much more
salary than a car driver who cannot
speak English language so inspire them
and equip them with a few skills and
also with some other activities
entertainment and other things so that
they become more inspired in their lives
so this is the purpose of IKEA to ignite
inspire and motivate children to unravel
the talents in them in conclusion the
vision of Akshaya Patra is no child in
India shall be deprived of Education
because of hunger today we are serving
17 lakhs children every day in about
fourteen thousand class government
schools our aspiration is to touch 50
lakh children every day we have an even
bigger aspiration and that is in a few
years from now we look forward for a day
when we can close down except etre
because all the children can be our
country will be free from poverty all
the parents can take care of their
children so that we don’t need to exist
so in other words we don’t want to be a
self-serving
program and organization thriving on and
celebrating the miseries of our country
but we want to celebrate the joy and
happiness in our country thank you very much
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