Poor children in rural areas often have to skip their breakfast, the first meal of the day, before leaving for school, which is considered one of the major factors for rising malnutrition. The children, starving for 12 to 16 hours after their last meal the previous night, find it difficult to focus on studies.
While their midday meal is taken care of by the government, there is no such scheme to provide breakfast to them. Sri Sathya Sai Annapoorna Trust aims to fill this gap by serving breakfast to 50,000 children studying in government schools in Greater Tirupati on all working days.
As a first step, the Chikkaballapura-based Trust launched the initiative for 30,000 children in the six mandals of Chandragiri constituency.
“While urban children can get their breakfast, their rural counterparts are not fortunate enough. It is hence we thought of chipping in with the breakfast initiative, which we consider a preventive, rather than a corrective measure,” says Anand K. Kadali, executive secretary and trustee.
The students of C. Gollapalli Mandal Parishad Primary School in Tirupati rural mandal, where the initiative began last week, are being served pulihora, upma, lemon rice and khichdi with pickle during a week.
The Trust takes care of not only the ration, vegetables and cooking gas, but pays the midday meal worker an extra honorarium of ₹800 per month. The team of 500 volunteers, along with hundreds of support staff, is currently on a mission to identify more such schools in Chittoor district to fulfill the promise made by their founder Madhusudan Sai to eliminate hunger at the abode of Lord Venkateswara.
Forty volunteers have quit IT jobs to join the initiative. “We need to strengthen our finances before foraying into newer areas. We intend to hand-hold the respective Panchayats till they are ready to take care of children in the long run,” observes Sai Prasad Ivaturi, the Trust’s treasurer, who appeals to companies to share their CSR funds for this noble cause. The Trust plans to extend the scheme next to either Satyavedu or Gangadhara Nellore constituencies.
