To India, with love: Andover kids donate coins to Akshaya Patra Foundation

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February 12, 2009

Every 12 cents buys meal for school-lunch effort in India

By Judy Wakefield

You've probably heard of elementary school students having pen pals overseas. Now, scores of Andover students have valentines in India.

Four elementary schools in town are thinking of less fortunate children in India this week with a special Valentine's Day project that involves them donating their spare change.

Local students at Bancroft, Sanborn and South elementary schools and Shawsheen School decorated containers for the Akshaya Patra Foundation and are collecting coins. The money will be donated to the foundation, which cooks and delivers meals to under-nourished Indian schoolchildren. The foundation's staggering numbers show it feeds 966,000 children daily in 5,600 schools from 16 kitchens in six different states in India.

"The idea is to make a child from India your valentine," said former South School Principal Eileen Woods, who has helped organize the school effort. "Especially now, with the way the economy is, we wanted it to be a very concentrated time around Valentine's Day. And I think it teaches the kids to think globally."

"It's a very nice, gentle concept on Valentine's Day," said Andover resident Madhu Sridhar. "They will know about children in India, [and think] 'they are our peers, and we can make them our valentines also.'"

Sridhar and fellow Andover residents Gururaj "Desh" and Jaishree Deshpande help run and support the U.S. office of Akshaya Patra, which operates the largest nongovernmental school-meal program in the world.

Some 40 percent of India's school-age children drop out before the sixth grade. Meals provide an incentive to children to come to school and stay in school. For many Indian children this is their only complete meal of the day, according to the foundation.

Akshaya Patra uses local food stocks and innovative technology to keep costs low enough to feed a child for an entire year for $28.

"When you think about what it costs to feed a child for the entire year, $28 isn't bad," said Woods. "It's amazing."

"For 12 cents, they can get a meal," said Sridhar.

Akshaya Patra's mechanized kitchens are designed by engineers to run inexpensively. The kitchens use local food to reduce costs associated with transportation and food spoilage while supporting the local economy.

The Foundation's goal is to feed one million students by 2010.

Interviews by Neil Fater contributed to this article.