When Titan Industries adopted the government school near its office in Bangalore as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative it found that repainting the school, renovating the toilets, and ensuring proper electricity and water were all well received, but what the children really required was something different. They needed food. The Titan team overseeing the project was told by the teachers that most children who attended the school were undernourished and simply too hungry, weak, and tired to concentrate on their studies.

Broadcom India had the same experience. When it decided to work with three underprivileged schools under its Project LOTUS (Linking Organisations to Underprivileged Schools), the company found that the foremost need was for the 300 children in these three schools to be fed. Both Titan and Broadcom realised that they themselves were not equipped for this job. As Rajendra Kumar Khare, MD of Broadcom India, puts it: "Both the quality of the food and the logistics were critical issues. We felt that despite our best intentions the initiative to provide food for the children could boomerang." After scouting around for the most effective way of fulfilling this requirement, both Titan and Broadcom decided to partner the Akshaya Patra Foundation, a Bangalore-based nonprofit organisation that provides midday meals to underprivileged children in schools in and around Bangalore. Titan and Broadcom aren't the only ones to partner Akshaya Patra. Infosys Foundation, Asea Brown Boveri, Siemens Ltd, AstraZeneca, DSP Merrill Lynch, and Yahoo.com are among the many corporates who are fulfilling part of their social responsibilities by linking up with Akshaya Patra.

One reason for the corporate response to the Akshaya Patra programme is that the corporates are becoming more and more sensitive to the need to fulfil their social responsibilities. They are also keenly aware that to be effective they need to direct their efforts towards a genuine cause. In Akshaya Patra, which addresses two of the most pressing problems for the underprivileged section of society -hunger and education, - the corporates see both a great cause and a genuine vehicle for fulfilling this need.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation was founded and promoted by ISKCON Bangalore and takes its name from the Mahabharat, in which Akshaya Patra was the pot which gave unlimited food. The programme began in Bangalore in July 2000, feeding 1,500 children in five schools. Over the years the programme has grown to feed more than 50,000 children in over 230 schools in and around Bangalore. Over 27,000 kg of food comprising rice, sambar, and curds is served every day. The food is cooked at a state-of-the-art kitchen designed to maximise efficiency and minimise cost, time, and labour. By 2006 the goal is to serve 250,000 children per day. According to Swarupa Srinivas, the chief dietician at Manipal Hospital, Bangalore, the meal meets the recommended dietary allowance. Says Srinivas; "I have inspected their kitchen, the equipment, the cooking methods, etc, and am impressed by the quality standards." 

Madhu Pandit Dasa, chairman of the Akshaya Patra Foundation, points out that special effort has been made to ensure that best practices of the corporate world like regular audits, transparent functioning, and economies of scale have been adopted by the foundation. (Madhu Pandit, who is also the president of ISKCON Bangalore, is an MTech from IIT Mumbai.) Says Pandit: "We want to function like a professional organisation with the highest standards." For instance, to ensure transparency and accountability, fund utilisation is audited by KPMG. And to ensure excellence in governance the foundation is managed by a group of professionals that include Mohan Das Pai, CFO of Infosys Technologies; Raj Kondur, chief of Nirvana Business Solutions; and Prof. Jitendra Singh, vice-dean of the Wharton School of Management, Philadephia. 

The foundation is now looking at expanding its operations beyond Bangalore to Mangalore, Mysore, Hassan, and Hubli. The Infosys Foundation has donated Rs l crore to start the programme in Hubli and the Bharti group has committed funds for the programme in north India.

Currently only about 20 per cent of the foundation's expenses are met by the corporate connections, the rest comes from individual sponsors and government subsidies. Pandit, however, is hopeful that more and more corporates will come forward to take this programme ahead. "We are ready to meet every level of standards that the corporates want," he says. It's over to the corporates now.