Akhilesh Yadav Performs Ground Breaking Ceremony for 11 Mid-Day Meal Kitchens in UP

Over 11,00,000 school children to receive healthy, nutritious mid–day meals every day in 11 district

India CSR Network

NEW DELHI: The Akshaya Patra Foundation is set to launch eleven new kitchens in partnership with the Government of Uttar Pradesh. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav announced the setting up of eleven new kitchens with the ‘Shilanyas’ (Ground Breaking Ceremony) on 26 December, 2016 at Lok Bhavan, New Secretariat – Lucknow.

These kitchens will start providing mid-day meals to children in the next academic year and increase the reach to over 1 lakh children per kitchen every day in due course.

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Foundation is currently feeding 1,05,000 children from its Vrindavan kitchen and 66,000 children from the Lucknow kitchen (which was inaugurated by Akhilesh Yadav on 15^th March, 2015), totalling to 1,71,000 children across 3021 schools in Uttar Pradesh. With the introduction of these new11 kitchens, the reach will be expanded to serving more than 13 lakh beneficiaries per day, which makes this the Foundation’s largest intervention in India.

Chanchalapathi Dasa said, “Akshaya Patra is poised to feed more than 1.3 million children in state on a daily basis, which is a shining example of a successful Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the field of nutrition, education and child welfare not only in India but across the world. We are committed to work with the Government to construct kitchens and provide healthy and nutritious mid-day meals to children.”

The districts where the eleven new kitchens will be constructed are Varanasi, Ghaziabad, Agra, Allahabad, Kanpur, Etawah, Kannauj, Ambedkar Nagar, Azamgarh, Rampur and Ballia. It was a landmark event in which the ground breaking ceremony for establishing all the eleven centralised kitchens was observed simultaneously, signalling the delivery of better nutrition, better education and a better future for the beneficiaries.

Madhu Pandit Dasa, Chairman – The Akshaya Patra Foundation, said, “This encouragement and support will help the Foundation take greater strides towards its mission of feeding 5 million children every day by 2020.”

There were a host of dignitaries present at the occasion including Ahmad Hasan–Cabinet Minister for Basic Education, Kailash Chourasiya – Minister for Women & Child Welfare, Wasim Ahmed – Minister for Child Development & Nutrition, Primary Education and Energy, Rajendra Choudhury – Cabinet Minister for Political Pension, Ram Govind Choudhury – Minister for Panchayat Raj, Pradeep Mathur – MLA, Mathura constituency, Alok Ranjan – Chief Advisor to Akhilesh Yadav, Rahul Bhatnagar – Chief Secretary, Ajay Kumar Singh – Secretary, Basic Education,  Chanchalapathi Dasa, Vice Chairman- The Akshaya Patra Foundation and Suvyakta Narasimha Dasa – President, The Akshaya Patra Foundation, UP.