Shridhar Venkat’s corporate career was taking him to China when a chance meeting with Madhu Pandit Dasa brought him to Akshaya Patra Foundation in January 2006. At that time, the foundation was serving 150,000 mid-day meals at schools. It now serves 2.35 million meals and 1 million servings of morning nutrition every day, Monday to Saturday, at 25,000 government schools and Anganwadi centres in 16 states and three Union territories. As the foundation completes 25 years on November 11, Venkat, over the course of a lunch without onion and garlic, looks back at the ups and downs and the lessons, and looks ahead to a time when Akshaya Patra might no longer be required to play its current role.
Q. How has the journey been?
I could not have asked God for more. I’ll give you one example. A few days back, I was with Palo Alto Networks. Their head of CSR told me, “I have a surprise for you.” At the end of the programme, he introduced me to a girl who was a beneficiary of Akshaya Patra for 10 years and now works with Palo Alto. I keep getting stories after stories of children whose lives have been transformed just because they get food and access to education.
Q. You moved from a corporate setup to an NGO setup. How was it?
I was probably among the early movers in a senior role to a not-for-profit. At the time, the development sector was more of a jhola culture, with stubble and coffee. But I presented to the chairman of Akshaya Patra and his key people that there was no harm in imbibing what was there in the corporate world for doing good. So, you can use tech for good. You can use corporate practices for good. And Madhu Pandit Prabhu, the chairman, said let’s do that. That’s how we started getting people from the corporate sector. These are guys who do not come here for the salary. These are people who believe in what Akshaya Patra is doing.
Q. Obviously, the mid-day meal programme is extremely popular. But one also hears about the meals not being very high in protein and things like that.
The core philosophy of Akshaya Patra is… one cannot match a mother’s meal, but we can try to get as close to it as possible. If I have to prepare that on a huge scale, how will I go about it? It’s not preparing 30 meals or 100 meals, right? It is 2.35 million meals a day. There is a government guideline, that you need to have 12 gm of protein for a primary school child, 20 for an upper primary school child, 450 calories for a primary school child, 700 for upper primary. Akshaya Patra goes beyond that. We realise that many children come to school hungry. So Akshaya Patra conceived a morning nutrition programme. Today, we have 1 million servings of morning nutrition, over and above the 2.35 million mid-day meals.
We have a central quality team which looks at the norms, compliances and all that. It does good manufacturing practices audits. Every location has a quality officer. Audits happen independently. Donors also do it.
In fact, Mr Ratan Tata came to know about Akshaya Patra. He flew his jet from Mumbai himself and came to our Hubli kitchen, which is the world’s largest kitchen. He asked us to name two areas in which he could support us. We told him one was to help us with improving our quality. He helped us for five years in putting together capacity for quality.
Q. And the second thing?
The second one is that, you know, even today we are a hand-to-mouth kind of organisation. Whatever comes in, we spend more than that. Sometimes there are delays. Now, we have to feed the children. We cannot say, we have not got the money. The child comes in the hope that he will get a meal. A mother will never say no to her child. Somehow, she will make it happen. So, we told Mr Ratan Tata that we needed a reserve. If there was a delay in getting the money, we could use the reserve. So, he gave us a decent reserve. It is a revolving reserve, a working capital reserve.
Q. Which year was this?
This was 2012. That helped us.
Q. So, 54 percent of your resources come from the government. How does that work? Is it all good or does it come with strings attached?
The government is our big brother. We are implementers of the government programme, and we take pride in it. One of the big reasons why we scaled up is because we implement the government programme efficiently and effectively.
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Q. You are also part of the prime minister’s (PM) programme.
Yes, PM Poshan. The government sees that whatever money they give us, we raise an equivalent amount. And through operational efficiency we unlock more money. So, there is a multiplier to every rupee the government gives. In fact, I would strongly recommend that you take the top five problems of the country and convert them into PPPs (public-private partnerships). You will solve all the problems of the nation.
Q. The development sector sometimes does not get along very well with governments. But you seem to have cracked it. And the composition of your people… as in, there are some missionaries and monks in Akshaya Patra. How does that work?
There are a couple of reasons why Akshaya Patra became what it is. One of them is PPP, the second is the confluence of missionaries and professionals. This is the secret sauce—from the beginning—and it will be there till the end.
Q. There may never be an end.
By the end in this case, what I’m trying to say is…. one of my dreams is to see Akshaya Patra become irrelevant by 2040.
Q. When such programmes are no longer needed, right?
Yeah. Maybe we will take up some other programme.
The second secret sauce is the missionary spirit and professionalism. I feel this works wonderfully because they bring that commitment, not giving up. And the professionals bring process, systems, worldview.
Third, you know, 9,000 of us get up in the morning and do just one job, which is to ensure a hot, safe and nutritious meal to children. About 15 years back, one guy called me and said, “I will give you ₹120 crore. Can you build toilets?” Ideally, I should have taken it up as an NGO. But we refused. It is a question of focus. We choose only those programmes which help scale up our core programme of feeding children.
The fourth is governance. Fifth is frugal innovation. For example, we were a South-based, not-for-profit. If you have to feed rice, sambar, sabji to 100,000 children, you need to bring in innovation, right? So, Akshaya Patra brought what was there in the industry: Steam boilers for generating 2 tonnes of steam to cook rice, sambar, dal.
When we went to North India… North Indian children don’t eat rice-sambar. But how do you cook 400,000 rotis in a few hours? So, we went to a sardarji in Jalandhar. He was an eighth grader and he had a machine making 1,000 papads (poppadom) per hour. He created a machine for us which could make 10,000 rotis per hour. Now, our chairman is from IIT. I report to two monks: One from IIT and the other from IISc (Indian Institute of Science). Coming back to this…
Q. One sec! Are they like actual, real monks?
Actual monks. A national talent scholar, IIT-Bombay alumnus. He is a monk. I have seen them wear the same kind of slippers for the last 30 years, use the same type of cloth.
Q. How are they chosen for these positions of chairman and vice chairman?
The visionary father of Akshaya Patra is one of the foremost spiritual masters from India, Swami Srila Prabhupada, who created the ISKCON worldwide. Swami Madhu Pandit Dasa and Swami Chanchalapathi Dasa, his disciples, carry forward the vision.
However, we are a trust. The trust is incorporated in a secular model. So, though the origin is from the temple, the trust is independent. The books are separate. The board is separate. The audit committee is separate.
Q. You were talking about this sardarji you found in Jalandhar.
Yes, yes. He made this 10,000 rotis-per-hour machine. Then our people, our engineers created a machine which can make 40,000 rotis per hour. In fact, we have a model which can make 60,000 rotis per hour. We do a lot of frugal innovations.
Q. How long back was this roti-making machine made?
Must be 2005 or 2006.
Q. How do you find these people? What led you to the sardarji in Jalandhar?
These monks are very entrepreneurial. On my second or third day in Akshaya Patra, I heard a nice thing from my chairman. He said, “The ability to take risk becomes infinite if you are selfless.” When you are entrepreneurial, you will find out-of-the-box solutions. The monks are always trying to find answers to questions.
Q. You are completing 25 years, right?
Yes.
Q. Is it next month?
Yes, November.
Q. Okay, so drawing upon Akshaya Patra’s journey of 25 years, what is it that an organisation like yours needs to succeed? Many do not succeed despite the best of intentions.
One is focus. The second is, you know, when an organisation is small, there is a lot of missionary spirit. When it becomes bigger, processes take over, and the connect between the leadership and people comes down. It becomes an impersonal process. You have to keep things simple. The first is focus, the second is simplicity. The third thing is innovation, frugal innovation. Fourth, governance. See, we are dealing with government money. We are dealing with private money, hard-earned money of philanthropists, individuals. You need to make sure that every paisa that comes in is traceable. Fifth, the combination of missionary spirit and professionalism—whether you have monks or not. And you should have a denominator mindset.
Q. What’s that?
You should look at our vision, “No child in India will be deprived of education because of hunger.” This we wrote when we were feeding 1,500 children in five schools. This is the universe of the problem we want to solve. Then, dignity mindset; just because I am feeding a poor child… we don’t give any leftover to a child.
Q. So, 25 years this November. What next?
Four things. Nourishing more children. Adding more to the plate of the child, more nutrition. Third, advocacy for change, and fourth is strengthening Akshaya Patra as an organisation.
Q. What do you mean by advocacy for change?
One lady in Kenya was feeding 50 children from a church. She saw a National Geographic story about Akshaya Patra’s mega kitchen in Hubli. She reached out to us, asking if they could come over and learn. We invited them, five women from Kenya. When she came, she had reached a few thousand children. We told her how we sourced items, how we processed, how we did audits, how we recruited people. Today, she and her team feed 350,000 children in Kenya, and she plans to feed 3 million children by 2030 in Africa. She could probably beat Akshaya Patra in scale, and we want that.
Q. What happened in 2020? I think some of your trustees and longtime supporters left. And one of them is very vocal.
You know, the vocal one tweeted two days back about our Goa kitchen.
Q. What did he say?
He is a nice man, very good at heart. All these trustees… they have done phenomenal work for Akshaya Patra, giving us that kind of credibility. In 2020, there was a difference of opinion between the executive trustees of Akshaya Patra and the non-executive trustees. We have a policy for apportionment of shared resources, under which we charge the related party for using the assets of Akshaya Patra. There were concerns about the usage of that by the outgoing people. Then there were concerns about whether we should have a structure which is completely CEO-driven. We pleaded with the outgoing trustees, said we will investigate each of these concerns. But somewhere we were not able to convince them.
Q. How did you address the matters?
We got one of the Big Four [audit firms] to do a forensic audit. The report was published and given to our board. Even before that, the new board appointed a two-member committee to go into the concerns expressed by the outgoing trustees, and they submitted a report to the board. Any donor or any stakeholder who asked for it, we gave them the committee’s report. The Big Four firm submitted its findings. It was an 800-page report which was adopted by the board. The highlights were that there were no financial irregularities, there was no misuse of funds.
For the three years for which the Big Four firm did the forensic audit—2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20—you can say the error found was 0.75 percent. I would have done about 100 or 120 zoom calls with all our top donors. I told them what the issue was and the steps we had taken. All the donors came back and supported Akshaya Patra. Last year we got the best NGO 2025 award from the Asian Centre for Governance and Sustainability.
Q. This policy of no onion and no garlic in your mid-day meals… is this for religious considerations or nutrition and hygiene?
This food you are eating… can you make out if there is any onion or garlic in it?
Q. No idea. This is delicious.
If you go back 800 or 1,000 years, India did not have onion-garlic. Onion-garlic came during the Mughal time. Let’s say you make sambar. If you put onion-garlic in it, it will go bad in two or three hours. If you make it without onion-garlic, it lasts six hours.
At Akshaya Patra, all along we focussed on two things. One, we should meet the nutritional compliance requirement of the government. Secondly, we should give a tasty meal to the child. I debate on this on some forums: What is the purpose of food? Nutrition and taste. We have data on all nutrition parameters. We have always believed that food need not have onion-garlic.
Akshaya Patra is all about unlimited food for education. Until the child says enough, we feed the child. They come two or three times. Some of them take food home. Akshaya Patra means a vessel that can give unlimited food.
Q. Like Draupadi’s vessel.
Yes, Draupadi got it from the Sun god.
Q. It’s a nice name for the foundation.
Dr Murlimanohar Joshi (former BJP president and Union minister) gave this name.
Q. Just out of curiosity, the absence of onion-garlic... does it bring down the cost? Because of fewer ingredients?
No, it doesn’t bring down the cost.
Q. Sometimes, onion prices shoot up before elections.
For us the big problem is dal prices. Dal is a big component of what we buy.
Speaking about what next, our goal is to go really big on morning nutrition. We want to do 3 million servings of morning nutrition by 2030, so tripling in five years (from 1 million now). We are at 2.35 million mid-day meals, going to scale it to 3 million. So, we’ll have 6 million servings a day by 2030. That means 1.3 to 1.4 billion servings in a year. So, we’ll feed one full India every year in terms of servings.
Q. Is there a plan to increase your funding? As you mentioned, you are hand-to-mouth.
When I say hand-to-mouth, one of the metrics I measure is the gap between income and expenditure. Our expenditure minus income should not be more than 2 percent of my top line. Right from the beginning, we diversified our fundraising. There is corporate fundraising, there is fundraising from philanthropists, there is fundraising from direct marketing, fundraising from internet marketing, fundraising from telemarketing.
We are just an instrument. We are like a squirrel which is building the big bridge in Rama’s army. A small squirrel. We are blessed to be part of it.
First Published: Nov 12, 2025, 12:44
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