NGO Akshay Patra wins BBC Award 

Akshaya Patra, a Bengaluru-based non-profit organisation (NGO) running one of the world’s largest school meals project in India was awarded BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) World Service Global Champion Award for the programme.

Nomination: The Akshaya Patra NGO was selected by an international panel of judges from nominations sent in by BBC World Service audience from all over the world.

Award Ceremony: The Award was presented to Akshaya Patra at the BBC Food and Farming Awards in Bristol in London, UK.

About Akshaya Patra’s School Meals Project

Background: Akshaya Patra Foundation is an NGO in India was founded by Madhu Pandit Dasa in 2000. Since its establishment it is running mid-day meal programme across India. Almost 20 years ago it started with providing 1,500 free school lunches every day and today it feeds 1.75 million children all over India with freshly prepared meals.

Motto: With the motto of-Unlimited Food for Education, its stated mission is to ensure that no child is deprived of education because of hunger. This is in recognition to the fact that some children may drop off education to do menial jobs to earn enough money to eat, and even if they do make it to classroom, an empty stomach can make it hard to concentrate.

For many children Akshaya Patra’s mid-day meal programme will be their main source of nutrition and keep them in education.

About BBC World Service Global Champion Award

This year was the 3rd edition of Global Food Champion.

Objective: It is awarded to recognise a person or project who is changing the way world produces, processes, consumes or thinks about food for the better.

Other projects on shortlisted for 2019 BBC award included UK charity WRAP (working towards reducing waste across various sectors), and Food 4 Education (a Kenya based NGO which provides heavily-subsidised meals at primary schools in Nairobi).

Previous Awardee: Last year award winner was chef Jose Andres who helped provide 3.4 million meals to people in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Month: Current Affairs - June, 2019