Ten year old Izaz Ahdil has 9 brothers and sisters as well as his grandmother living in their small four room home. But, he says, neither his mother nor father work. With such a large family to support, Ahdil’s parents have faced many struggles trying to make ends meet.

“I have a mutton stall,” his father M. K. Ibrahim says with reluctance, when asked what he does for a living, only to admit a few minutes later that he has been unable to work for years.

“There are so many problems with my health,” explains Ibrahim. Izaz Ahdil’s mother, a home maker, has very little education herself. Unable to read and write fluently there is little she can do to help her family financially.

Across India, cities like Mangalore are grappling with the problem of growing numbers of urban poor. They consist close to 26.7% of the total number of poor people in the country. Every 7th person in India is said to be a slum dweller. The effects of increasing urban poverty are illustrated by the fact that in 12 states across the country, the percentage of urban children wasting has risen between 1998-2000 and 2004-06 *.

Stories like Ahdil’s are not uncommon, at Mangalore’s DKZP Higher Primary School Baikampady Muslim where he attends 5th standard. A teacher at the school, Gracie Hilda M. Crasta, explains how the children there come from extremely underprivileged families that face tough financial conditions. As an educator bearing witness to the problems faced by children in her school, she fully understands the need for a mid-day meal program like the one that Akshaya Patra implements.

“We can see them waiting for Akshaya Patra’s food. They’ll be straining to see through the classroom windows. Many of them don’t have breakfast before coming to school. They’re so hungry and eager that they sometimes quarrel with each other to get to it first,” she says.

Gracie is not the only one to have seen the impact of the meal. Akshaya Patra’s kitchen in Mangalore is a centralized facility that cooks thousands of meals in a few short hours. Specially designed food vans then transport these freshly cooked meals to schools before lunch time everyday. Teachers across the city are seeing the benefits of the mid-day meal program implemented by Akshaya Patra.

“We’ve had teachers come up to us and say, ‘it’s such incredible work you do serving food to thousands of students every school day without a break. It is helping children so much’,” says head of Akshaya Patra’s Mangalore kitchen, Shri Karunya Sagara Dasa.

*Report on the state of food insecurity in urban India. 
https://www.mssrf.org/fs/pub/report%20on%20the%20state%20of%20food%20insecurity.pdf