Modi serves Akshaya Patra’s 3 billionth meal

By Nivedita Singh

Vrindavan, Feb 11 (IANS) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday served food to school children here, including the third billionth meal by the Akshaya Patra Foundation at the Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir campus.

The Bengaluru-based foundation, incepted in 2000, serves wholesome school lunch to over 1.76 million children in 14,702 schools across 12 states in India, according to its website.

Modi also unveiled a ceremonial plaque to mark the serving of "third billionth meal" by Akshaya Patra Foundation.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, local MP Hema Malini, Uttar Pradesh Cabinet Ministers Shrikant Sharma, Lamxi Narayan Chaudhary and Anupama Jaiswal were present at the event.

In an attack on previous governments for what he said was slow work in the field of child nourishment, vaccination and cleanliness, Modi underlined that not much success was gained in past.

In the past 55 months, the central government had been serving children and mothers for their nourishment and health.

"Be it arrangements for child nourishment, vaccination and cleanliness, it is not that the topic was not discussed earlier. All these aspects were discussed... Several schemes were also launched. But not much success was gained in the past."

He also said that countries with fewer facilities were ahead of India in these fields.

"To end this situation, we since 2014 have been working with new strategies in the field of vaccination, cleanliness and child nourishment and decided to conduct these on a mission mode."

Speaking about Mission Indradhanush, he said over 3 crore 40 lakh children and 90 lakh mothers had been vaccinated since the launch of the scheme.

The concept of serving of food in schools -- midday meal -- was an old concept, he said.

"We are ensuring that children will get enough clean and nutritious food," he said.

(Nivedita Singh can be contacted at nivedita.singh@ians.in)