Bengaluru civic workers to get Akshaya Patra meals from November

BENGALURU: About 28,000 civic workers who toil to keep the city clean will get hot meals served by Akshaya Patra from November, Bengaluru Mayor G Padmavathi said Friday.

“Such a project for civic workers is the first in India,” Padmavathi said. “The workers will get rice and sambar four days in a week. On the other three days, they will get bisibele bath, palau and rice bath. Each meal will cost us Rs 20, and it will be supplied at 10am every day.” The civic body will provide plates and glasses to the pourakarmikas, she added.

For the first time, in its 2016-17 budget, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) earmarked Rs 10 crore to provide midday meals to pourakarmikas, most of whom are employed by private contractors. Typically, a pourakarmika starts the day at 4.30 am, reports to a mustering centre and then pushes carts collecting garbage.

Akshaya Patra, a Bengaluru-based nonprofit run by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) runs the world’s largest school lunch programme. The organisation cooks and supplies midday meals to 1.84 lakh schoolchildren in Bengaluru alone.

In its July 5 edition, ET had reported that BBMP was in talks with Akshaya Patra to supply meals to civic workers in the city.

“Our logistics network is already in place in all the 198 municipal wards. We just need to figure out how we can merge this with our school lunch programme," Akshaya Patra’s head of operations (Bengaluru, Ballari, Lucknow and Vrindavan) Vinay N Kumar had said in July.