The Akshaya Patra Foundation wins Marico Innovation Foundation Award

The Akshaya Patra Foundation won the Marico Innovation Foundation award at the 4^th edition of the Innovation for India Awards 2012 under the Social Category. The Foundation shared the award with three other organisations – Fractal Foundation, St. Jude and Teach for India for the innovations in the social sector by a social organization impacting Education, Health and  Poverty. The Akshaya Patra Foundation won the award out of the 145 applicants competing under the social category.
Congratulating The Akshaya Patra Foundation and emphasising on the need to appreciate innovations in the various sector, Harsh Mariwala, founder of Marico Innovation Foundation and Chairman and Managing Director, Marico Ltd said, "India is clearly burgeoning with talent, so corporate India and government must create an ecosystem to allow innovations to thrive. The awardees stood out among all the 432 entries on the basis of sustainability, impact and its inclusive approach." The Awards followed a transparent evaluation system with a Knowledge Partner – Bain & Company and an Eminent Jury panel led by Dr R A Mashelkar.
Sri Chanchalapathi Dasa, Vice President, The Akshaya Patra Foundation, said, “The award is yet another testimony to our dedication. The recognition boosts our innovative spirit which has been the underlying essence of our success story. We have grown from feeding 1,500 school children in 2000 in Bangalore to 1.3 million school children across eight states today.”
Marico Innovation Foundation institutionalised the “Innovation for India Awards” to recognize the greatest innovations to come out of India in the recent past - innovations that have positively impacted lives and have at their core a great idea coupled with a unique insight. The awards are given away in four categories: Product, Process, Service and Business Model.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation providing hot, nutritious freshly cooked classroom lunches for nearly 1.3 million underprivileged children in India.  It runs the world’s largest NGO midday meal program for underprivileged school children in India. In June 2000, Akshaya Patra started feeding 1500 children in 5 schools in Bangalore. Within just 10 years of its inception, Akshaya Patra today feeds nearly 1.3 million children in 8 states from 18 kitchens all over India.
A public-private partnership project, Akshaya Patra is a secular programme that claims to combine good management, innovative technology and smart engineering to deliver school lunch at a fraction of the cost of similar programs in other parts of the world. With an average government subsidy of 50 percent, Rs 675 can feed a child for a year. The foundation aims to serve 5 million children daily by 2020.