NE NEWS SERVICE
LONDON, NOV 5
The UK chapter of an Indian charity set up to combat child poverty is bringing a tried and tested model of a state-of-the-art kitchen from India as an affordable, scalable solution to childhood hunger in Britain, a release said.
Akshaya Patra Foundation UK has joined hands with GMSP Foundation in response to the growing concern around children in need across England not being provided free meals during what is currently a half-term school holiday period.
The new GMSP Akshaya Patra Kitchen promises to produce and deliver thousands of nutritious, low-cost meals to children in London.
Each meal the GMSP Akshaya Patra Kitchen serves in the UK will also sponsor a meal for a child in India. GMSP stands for God My Silent Partner.
The zero waste and self-sustaining kitchen model was created in India, providing nutritious lunches from 52 kitchens to more than 1.8 million children in over 19,000 state-run schools every school day. It has now been recreated for operation here in Watford, London, providing a much-needed solution to the recommendations on tackling childhood hunger set out in the National Food Strategy and backed by Manchester United footballer, Marcus Rashford MBE.
When asked about how this project came about, Ramesh explained that Shri Morari Bapu often talks about the importance of feeding people in his kathas. Inspired by Morari Bapu’s teachings, Ramesh approached Ravinder Chamaria, president of Akshaya Patra UK, with the idea of bringing the kitchen concept to the UK as a scalable solution to the country’s growing child hunger crisis. Together they visited Shri Morari Bapu for his guidance and blessings.
Ramesh talks with passion about the teachings of Shri Morari Bapu who has inspired millions with his recitals on truth, love, and compassion. He said, “It is because of Bapu’s blessings that the GMSP Akshaya Patra kitchen has come about.”
The kitchen model ensures that children receive optimum levels of nutrition, designed to feed minds, not just fill bellies.
The GMSP Akshaya Patra Kitchen is a unique design that can help to solve several concurrent hungers and nutrition-related crises in the UK. GMSP Foundation donated £500,000 to set up the kitchen.
The founders of the GMSP Foundation, Ramesh and Pratibha Sachdev, are long-time funders of Akshaya Patra in India and have supported food programmes for children and the homeless for many years in India as well as the UK. After visiting the Akshaya Patra kitchen in Ahmedabad, Ramesh and Pratibha were very impressed with the innovative kitchen concept.
With regards to plans for the future, Ramesh continued, “Our shared goal is to expand the GMSP Akshaya Patra Kitchen’s centralised model to serve more nutritious holiday meals and then free school meals to children in London and around the UK. With this approach, the UK can solve holiday hunger and ensure our future generations have hot, fresh meals to fuel their minds.”
The GMSP Akshaya Patra Kitchen will focus first on tackling the growing holiday hunger issue in London and Watford before extending this to serve schools as soon as possible. The Kitchen will cook two meal cycles a day: one for children during the holidays (2,000 meals) and one for those living in food poverty (3,000 meals) across London and Watford. When operating at full capacity the Kitchen can produce 5,000 child meals per day and 4,000 meals for those living in food poverty.
