HYDERABAD: Telangana state gets the country’s largest kitchen covering 65,000 square feet, at Sangareddy. The Rs 21-crore kitchen can prepare food for 1 lakh people in two hours. Well-known NGO Akshaya Patra that is been funded by international agencies has built the kitchen especially to provide midday meals to 1,50,000 government school children and the poor under the Rs 5-a-meal scheme.
The first high-tech, state-of-the-art, centralised mega kitchen is located at Khandi in Sangareddy. Akshaya Patra, TS and AP president Satya Gaura Chandra Dasa, said, “Workers will be using double jacketed cauldrons for cooking the rice and sambhar. These cauldrons enhance taste and are totally hygienic. A separate advanced RO purifier plant has been built for filtered water where the wastage of water would be minimal and restricted to 5-6 per cent as compared to regular RO purifier where wastage of water is almost to the extent of 30-40 per cent.”
He said the kitchen had a separate effluent treatment plant to treat the domestic waste. It has been built on a special German technology based flooring which is easy to wash and maintain." The other feature of the mega kitchen includes special steam generators that have been installed that operate on fuel for faster cooking of the meals. Sortex machines have been placed to segregate all foreign material from rice. The kitchen will use 1 lakh litres of water per day for operations and most of this will be treated and used for various purposes.
Apart from being built for charity, it will provide direct employment to about 300 people. “The kitchen is ready. We are looking for a good muhurtham to start operations”, he said. Akshaya Patra currently feeds 1,26,735 children in 880 schools in Hyderabad and plans to expand its reach to many more beneficiaries in Telangana. The charity organisation also distributes food to GHMC at Rs 5 a meal. The GHMC pays Rs 15 as subsidy, the Akshaya Patra pays Rs 2.50 and it is sold at Rs 5 per serving.
