A few months ago, a friend forwarded an email with 24 pictures of the Akshaya Patra kitchen workflow. If Akshaya Patra is ever asked to use only 24 pictures for a fundraising pitch, they should use these. Perhaps they already do. Besides the pictures, I’ve also pasted the first paragraph of my next post on.. (you guessed it) midday meals.
Akshaya Patra, a Sanskrit term with origins in the famous epic Mahabharata, translates to inexhaustible vessel. A public charitable trust which provides nutritious, high quality and tasty mid-day meals to 1.3 million children daily across 8,196 schools and 8 states using a centralized infrastructure of 18 mega-kitchens. It took Akshaya Patra 9 years to reach the 1 million mark and they plan to reach 5 million children by 2020. Wow! Clearly they are doing no disservice to the origins of their name.
3-storey kitchen uses Gravity Flow Mechanism. Capacity to cook 50,000 to 100,000 mid-day meals per day. Costs approx. 9 crores to set up.
Kitchen from the inside consisting of rice cauldrons, each of which cooks up to 110kg of rice in 20 min. Sambar cauldrons cook up to 1200 litres of sambar in 2 hours.
Rice washed thoroughly on the 2nd floor.
Washed rice is sent down the chute to the 1st floor.
Rice pours down into steam heated cauldrons. Entire cooking process takes place on 1st floor.
Super heated steam is used to cook food instead of flame.
When cooking is finished, it is loaded into trolleys.
Cooked rice is sent down the chute to the ground floor.
It flows down the pipe into containers.
Piping hot rice on its way to being loaded into food vans. Around 6000 kilosof rice are cooked daily in each kitchen.
Food materials in kitchen.
Stock in the kitchen.
Washed dal and vegetables flows down the chute into sambar cauldron on the 1st floor.
Vegetables and dal ready to be cooked.
Sambar being cooked on the 1st floor.
Cooked sambar is packed and sent to the food vans to be loaded
