School food gets a tech recipe: Auto cauldrons, high nutrition

Panaji: On Monday, when the Akshaya Patra Foundation starts its Goa operations to supply midday meals to school students from April, there will be many firsts. From automated cauldrons for rice and dal to high efficiency idli steamers, the foundation will be making use of technologies for Goa’s first centralised mid-day meal kitchen.
Besides higher efficiency, the new product development centre of the foundation will also ensure the nutritional content of the food remains intact.
“The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has supported the entire infrastructure of the kitchen. We have introduced things like automated rice and dal cauldrons, high-efficiency idli steamers, semi-automated chapati-making machine. Our new product development centre has ensured that there is novelty while meeting the essential dietary guidelines given by govt so that the students receive the essential vitamins proteins, carbohydrates for healthy physical growth and cognitive development,” Akshaya Patra Foundation chief executive officer Shridhar Venkat told TOI.
Goa is the 17th state where Akshaya Patra Foundation has stepped in to supply hot cooked meals to school children. It is the foundation’s 78th such kitchen.
He said though the capacity of the kitchen is 5,000, in phase I, meals will be provided to 2,500 students, and later the operations will be scaled to the full capacity of 5,000.
“The school list will be given to us by govt. This will be our first initiative in Goa. This is a brownfield project, where govt was kind enough to give us space to set up the kitchen. Cost of the meal is going to be around Rs 22, out of which we are expecting Rs 11 to come from the govt support,” Venkat said.
He said a menu for Goan children will be prepared, based on local preferences.
“We cater to the local palatal preferences wherever Akshaya Patra goes. Akshaya Patra is known for its food safety, hygiene, and quality. We will have full-fledged monitoring at the central level as well as in Goa, there will be our executives. We have a daily feedback mechanism from schools so that we can improve what we are doing,” Venkat said.
He said that the idea of setting up Akshaya Patra kitchen was conceived many years ago with Manohar Parrikar as Goa’s CM and that the foundation is finally excited to see his vision become a reality.
“The honourable chief minister at the time, Manohar Parrikar, was very keen that we come to Goa. It is the kindness of Pramod Sawant for giving us a place to set up the kitchen. We are very excited to be coming to Goa. We want to see a good meal becoming an incentive for these children to come to school and to see that they get nourishment, and they can study well and contribute to this talent pool of Goa,” Venkat said.