HI INDIA
Shamvir Singh says he downs a glass of milk before walking to school, but when asked what else he eats at home, the 12-year-old droops his head in silence.
He is embarrassed, but none of the other students who are crowded around him in the dusty junior high school courtyard tease him. Half of them, estimates the principal, only get one meal a day: the free hot lunch offered at schools around India.
"Children from very poor farming families now come regularly; they look forward to the meal," says Shiv Singh, the headmaster of the Shri Krishak school in Beri, a village three hours south of New Delhi. "They used to go off to help their parents farm."
Shamvir and his classmates’ squat in the dirt, watching as the sari-draped lunch ladies go down lines filling the metal bowls in front of them.
The Indian government provides free hot lunches to 120 million students a day, the largest school lunch program in the world. For comparison, the United States provided low-cost or free lunches to some 31 million children a school day in 2009.
The massive undertaking started as a flawed welfare program that has been improved with the help of a Hindu religious group teaming up with some of India's top engineers.
The reforms by the group, the Akshaya Patra Foundation, are expanding school attendance, cutting down on hunger, and, anecdotally, lifting caste divisions. Some of their innovations in food processing also hint at the potential for adding value to India's bountiful crops in ways that serve the poor who grow them.
Initially, under the national mid-day meal program, free grain was distributed to parents and school kids were sent home for lunch break. The problem: Many families sold the grain and the kids went hungry.
That was the case in Berii. Headmaster Mr. Singh points to one of the eldest girls. "She returned late to school every day and when asked why, she said, 'There was no food.' "
The scale of India's hunger issue becomes clear
In 2000, a group of Hare Krishnas in Bangalore noticed the problem. They began to take the rations and deliver a daily cooked meal to a few local schools, building on a Hindu tradition of serving meals for the poor.
Soon the group received letters from other schools wanting to be included. Within months the requests totaled 100,000.
"We were shocked," says Suvyakta Das, a president of Akshaya Patra, the secular foundation formed by the Hare Krishnas to do this charity work. "We didn't realize the scale of this issue in Bangalore."
They would soon learn the scale of the issue nationwide, but for the moment the question was how to cook 100,000 lunches a day?
"Everybody said, 'This scale? Sorry,' " says Mr. Das. However Das – who graduated from a top engineering university in India – along with other engineer devotees in the group designed "centralized kitchens" capable of churning out more than 100,000 lunches every morning.
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