Akshaya patra: Covid pandemic and thereafter

Abstract

On a pleasant Monday evening in November 2021 —a day before the annual strategy meeting of The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF), Shridhar Venkat, the CEO of TAPF, sat in his office at TAPF headquarters in Bengaluru, India. As he glanced through the reports shared by his team ahead of the meeting, he felt calm yet unsettled. The calmness came from having not only seen TAPF grow from feeding 1,500 children in 2000 to feeding 1.8 million children daily in 2019, but also having successfully executed relief feeding efforts by providing 96 million cooked meals and 116 million servings of dry ration and other essential items to families in India through the two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic (roughly 18 months starting March’20). At the same time, he felt unsettled as TAPF had ambitious goals to further their vision that “No child in India shall be deprived of education because of hunger”, and they hoped to be feeding 5 million children a day soon. To accomplish that, however, TAPF needed to progress on the path to becoming economically self-sustaining. Sridhar wondered if TAPF’s newly uncovered potential during the large-scale relief feeding efforts in the pandemic can be leveraged to take TAPF further in the direction of self-sustained organisation. To find his answers, he recalled the journey TAPF has been through during the Covid-19 pandemic.