Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Jagriti Yatra Diary - Naandi, feeding a million hungry children

Dec 31 - We reached Hyderabad just before noon and headed straight to the imposing campus of the Indian School of Business.

We had a televised CNBC TV 18 panel discussion on 'Funding Indian Entrepreneurs' the panelists were Prof.Nandini Vaidyanathan, Alok Kejriwal and Deval Sanghvi.

Prof.Nandini Vaidyanathan, teaches entrepreneurship at princeton, IIM-B and other schools apart from promoting a company called Startups which mentors young entrepreneurs check www.forstartups.blogspot.com

Alok Kejriwal, is the founder of Contests2win.com, mobile2win, Games2win.com etc and also mentors first generation entrepreneurs.

Deval Sanghvi, Dasra directs philanthropists with investment strategies in the social sector, investing and scaling up several eminent non-profits. check www.dasra.org

The panel discussion was very interesting providing reality checks about venture capitalists, the professor and Mr.Kejriwal did most of the talking. I was slightly disappointed I couldn't hear more about Dasra or interact with him later.

We then headed to Naandi, which is into Elementary Education, Water, Mid-day meals, organic farming and social advocacy. We visited their centralised kitchen which is one of the largest of its kind cooking over 1,20,000 nutritious meals everyday for the children of Hyderabad's govt schools. We met Ms.Leena Joseph who showed us around the cleaning process, the large steam operated kitchen, the spices section, the packing and loading bays.

We learnt that Naandi works at AP, Rajasthan, MP, Orissa where large centralised kitchens are setup through public private partnership - Kitchens funded through donations, rice supplied by the FCI, Rs.3-4, paid per child by the state govt, electricity supplied by the govt. The rest including fortification with essential nutrients, QC and transport to the schools is done by Naandi. Check www.naandi.org
We then headed back to the station for yummy dinner and started off from Hyderabad at 11.30 PM.

PS: I'll update the blog with some pictures later

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