Daily kitchen
The kitchen runs at four
Not charity, arithmetic — a hungry child cannot sit still for two hours
- Reach
- 2,412 children fed each centre day
- Where
- One kitchen in Hadapsar, cooking for all eleven centres
- Who
- Every child enrolled at a centre, with no separate list and no means test at the door
The kitchen is one room behind the Hadapsar centre with four gas burners, three vessels a person can stand in, and four cooks who have been there longer than most of the teachers.
It starts at four. Everything is cooked the same afternoon it is eaten, which rules out central kitchens and long transport and is the reason our cost per plate is higher than the big national programmes.
Why our plate costs more
The largest mid-day meal operations in India publish a cost of around ₹14 a plate. They cook at a scale we will never reach, and a state government pays about ₹6 of that under the mid-day meal scheme.
We are one kitchen, cooking an evening meal, with no scheme behind it. So our number is roughly twice theirs and always will be. We would rather explain that than quietly quote somebody else’s figure.
The thing we were wrong about
For the first year the meal went home in a tiffin. It seemed obviously kinder — the family eats, not just the child.
What happened is that one plate fed five people badly. The child we had enrolled was still hungry at six the next evening, and still could not sit through the second hour. Serving at the centre felt colder and worked.
How it runs
What actually happens
- 01
It is an evening meal, not a mid-day meal
The government's mid-day meal scheme covers lunch at school and covers it reasonably well. We do not duplicate it. What nobody covers is the evening, and the eleven weeks of summer when school is shut and the lunch stops with it.
- 02
Eaten at the centre, not carried home
The first year we let children carry the meal home. It was shared five ways, which is exactly what any decent family would do, and no child got a full meal. Now it is eaten at the centre, on a steel plate, sitting down.
- 03
The menu is the same one the cooks feed their own families
Rice or bhakri, a dal, a seasonal vegetable, and an egg or sprouts twice a week. The four women who cook are from Ramtekdi and set the menu themselves. Nobody from the office has ever improved it.
- 04
Weighed in front of whoever asks
Twelve quintals of grain a month, and the delivery is weighed at the gate with the centre's own scale. Any parent, donor or passer-by can stand there while it happens, and some do.
- 05
No separate list, no means test at the door
Every child at a centre eats. Sorting children into the ones who need feeding and the ones who do not, in front of each other, costs more than the food it saves.
How we are judged
The measures,
including the flat ones
Children in the underweight band
34% at intake21% after twelve monthsPLACEHOLDER figures against WHO growth standards. Replace with the client's own height and weight records, which they take at the annual health check anyway.
Attendance in the last hour of the session
71% before the kitchen94% sinceThe measure that actually convinced us. Children were leaving early because they were hungry, not because they were bored.
Cost of a plate
Rs 31 in 2023Rs 28 in 2026PLACEHOLDER. It fell because volume rose, not because the plate got smaller. Confirm against the client's own kitchen accounts.
What has not worked
We do not know what happens on the days a child does not come. We feed the children in front of us and we cannot claim more than that. Any organisation telling you a single evening meal has ended a child's malnutrition is selling you something — it removes one specific obstacle to sitting through a two-hour class, and that is the claim we will defend.
In this programme
What a rupee buys here
- ₹28
A hot evening meal
Rice or bhakri, a dal, a seasonal vegetable, and an egg or sprouts twice a week. Cooked in our own kitchen and eaten at the centre, not carried home, because a meal carried home gets shared five ways.
PlaceholderPLACEHOLDER. For scale: Akshaya Patra publish a cost of Rs 14.33 per mid-day plate, of which a state government pays Rs 5.87. An evening meal carries no state subsidy and one kitchen has no economies of scale, so it costs more. Confirm against the client's own kitchen accounts before publishing.
- ₹620
A month of evening meals for one child
Twenty-two centre days. The month is the honest unit here, not the meal — a child who eats on eleven days out of twenty-two has not been fed.
DerivedDERIVED from the meal cost above (Rs 28 x 22 centre days). Inherits its placeholder status.
- ₹6,700
A year of evening meals for one child
Two hundred and forty days of eating, including the summer weeks when school shuts and the free meal at school stops with it.
DerivedDERIVED from the meal cost above (Rs 28 x 240 days). Inherits its placeholder status.