Chennai in India had massive floods. I wanted to figure out how do I reach out and help the people of Chennai. And I came across Akshaya Patra. I called them up, instantly the very next day we were able to deliver 10, 000 meals. Akshaya Patra's supply chain is very, very complicated. The numbers with Akshaya Patra are always astounding. 2. 3 million children. We are coming up on the four billionth meal. You should see the sophistication of these machines that turn out the teplas as in the rate t
hat without a human hand touching anything. Akshaya Patra's kitchens and their technological marvels. Do we have AI strategy for Akshaya Patra? Microcontrollers that precisely tell you how much of what to add, what not to add. Dear friends, welcome to Akshaya Patra's podcast series. We are in episode two today. And we are so excited to talk to Siva Sivaram, who is the chairman of the board of Akshaya Patra USA. Welcome Siva. Thank you. How are you? Good to be with you. I'm very well. Thank you.
I have been very intrigued, uh, about your journey, how you started and how you made it in the technology industry and specifically your role in Akshaya Patra. I would love to hear about how you got started and then what made you join Akshay Patra. So let me talk about both sides of it. I don't know what making it in the technology world means, but I have been in the technology world in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley for a considerable amount of time. I have been in big companies, I've started
startups. I have sold startups. I have been in large corporations and small companies. I was in the semiconductor world for almost 40 years. And then I made a big career change to go run an energy storage industry. Today we are sitting in the offices of Quantumscape, which is a revolutionary solid state battery company. And these are, as you know, extraordinarily important technologies for the world. The world, the country and individuals, semiconductors have been the basis of the digital revolu
tion. That's what has made everything we do here today possible. But on the flip side, the world is getting warmer. It's causing untold amount of Change in people's livelihood everywhere in the world because of this warming climate. Energy storage is the key enabler for us going renewable in most of our energy needs. That's the reason I came over to come and run QuantumScape. And so these two, in the end, you pursue what you're passionate about. Right. So if you're going to ask me, what is Quant
umScape? It drives me, it is, I go after things that I'm passionate about. And the other one that, as you know, I'm most passionate about is Akshaya Patra . It happened that about a decade ago, Chennai in India had massive floods. It happened recently, six months ago or three months ago, but this happened about a decade ago. And, uh, Me being a native of Chennai, coming, having come from Chennai, I wanted to figure out how do I reach out and help the people of Chennai. And I came across Akshaya
Patra, I called them up. Instantly the very next day, we were able to deliver 10, 000 meals. We had a mobile kitchen from Bangalore go over and deliver instantly. And then I started following up on the organization. the scale and what the contributions are. I come from a rural part of India, from deep south India, about 250 miles south of Chennai. I know what it takes for the people around me growing up to send their children to the school. And in most cases, how important the midday meal progr
am was. When I put these two together, an organization that could so quickly deliver things and my own passion about doing something back to those children in India, I became involved with Akshaya Patra and have had the opportunity to work with them over the last decade. Thanks for sharing that. Um, that that's, that's very inspiring as well. Um, and Akshaya Patra at a national state in India itself has done, has had a tremendous impact. As of today, Akshaya Patra serves 2. 2, almost 2. 2 millio
n children daily with midday meals. And Akshaya Patra, just for our viewers, Akshaya Patra is one of the world's largest midday meals program, uh, in schools. So, and this is a tremendous impact for someone to even learn. But I do know that Akshaya Patra also has had reach in other countries. Um, what would you like to share with us on that? Yeah. The numbers with respect to Akshaya Patra are always astounding. 2. 3 million children a day. We are coming up on the four billionth meal just during
COVID. We served close to a quarter of a billion meals in India. Wow. We do this all for under $20. Per Child per whole school year. Mm-Hmm. . Wow. And we are able to do this with the close to 5- 6,000 employees in India. Mm-Hmm. . But the United States supports about a quarter of this. And we have grown tremendously over the last several years. And so the numbers about Akshaya Patra are tremendous. But sitting here in the US, where we've been blessed, we've been blessed with, in some cases, ex
cesses of everything. We don't quite, um, understand the scope and impact of Akshaya Patra. Recently, maybe six weeks ago, I read an article about a Nigerian NGO who essentially modeled themselves after Akshaya Patra to go do in Lagos exact thing what we are doing in India, growing. That's brilliant. Yeah. And you, you'd see them, they say the same things, food for education, making sure that we do a centralized kitchen. How do I get a public private partnership going? How do we get philanthropy
combined with the government and work with the midday meals programs of the schools? We tried this in England, in London, we're able to do this. Oh, wow. Even in the U. S., we are in the rudimentary stages of thinking through how we can affect the education of people who have food insecurity. That's awesome. We've not gone very far, but we will get there and we'll be able to talk to you on a, on a further podcast like this. But you can see the model is now being replicated around the world. Whe
n it comes to the U. S. in particular. Food insecurity is a big deal. We think of a affluent areas like the Bay Area things that there is so much wealth here. The problem is always the same, whether it is India or here, there is the ability to feed everybody, but there is no will to feed everybody. Our job is to take that model that we have done in India and make sure we can do it around the world. That's so well said. How do we inspire? How do we make sure that we bring out the will? And, you k
now, I have, I have believed humans natural nature is to be kind. As we grow up, we somehow lose that momentum. What do you think, what can we do? You know, you said it very, very well. Humans are born kind. We ideologically go off into our corners and not do it. The best way is for us to physically see a demonstration of this. And I say this to everybody. If you ever go to India, make it a point. to go to an Akshaya Patra kitchen. Even more important, go with that food truck, go to the school a
nd serve the children as they come in at lunchtime, as they are hungry and you feed them. You will never again be the same. So my own thought is over time, I hope there will be more people. Listening to you around the world on this podcast, would get inspired to go see it. We can show what is possible. We can show, as a humankind, what we can do together. How much of an impact we can make. I, I completely agree. And I think sharing and physical, as you're saying, just going there and observing,
and then also sharing the stories, right? Like how it transformed the child's future and life just by 20$ a year. I think that's what we literally asked for in us. Um, and you would not even blink an eye. Sometimes you go to Starbucks and spend 10 bucks for a cup of coffee, right? I'll give you a, a, a inspiring story. Mm hmm. Geetha who's standing here and I were hosting Chef Sanjeev Kapoor and we were doing a lunch and learn event at Western Digital, my prior company. There were probably 500 p
eople who were sneaking around in a queue trying to take pictures with Chef Sanjeev Kapoor and they were all talking about what it is to have someone idle like him to visit us. And then there is. A petite, very beautiful young lady who was standing right next to me and she said, Siva , let me introduce myself? I said, yes, please. I'm an Akshaya Pathra kid. Wow. And we had tears in our eyes. Here's a person, an engineer at Western Digital working in San Jose. Who was an Akshaya Patra kid and I
did not know she was in the organization. Yeah, no, that's brilliant. That's what we thought we were talking about here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it actually rained tears to my eyes right now. It's so beautiful and inspiring. Thank you for sharing that. Maybe switching gears a little bit on the technology, use of technology at Akshaya Patra. A lot of people learn from it. We use technology day in and day out to scale the operations. But I'm also curious, uh, two parts to this question. One is wha
t other examples have you seen in the nonprofit sector or other technology sector, which we could borrow and might be useful or which are already happening and the other is what's in store in future for future of. Akshaya Parthra's use of technology to scale the operations. So this is a vast question. In general, how can we apply technology to philanthropic activities? What are good examples of them? How do we apply it on Akshaya Parthra? What have we used and where would this go? And when I thi
nk this, there are many places people. from Silicon Valley who have gone back and started doing it. For example, I'll give you a simple example of a, of an organization that is trying to use, um, let's say you have Google Maps. Mm hmm. Google Maps shows you, hey, you start here, you need to go there, you press a map and you come back and tell you. It is not probabilistic. It doesn't say you may get there. It'll tell you exactly how to get there and tells you 100 percent of the time to get there.
Right. The fellow who did Google Maps in the US has gone back and said, why can't I do the same thing for education? If I want to go from here to there, I'll have a curated set of everything you need to go all the way from here to there. You start in 10th grade and you say, I want to apply for engineering, type your background, tell you, and it'll give you every, they don't create content, but they will give you exactly. what you need, where you need, what you do, when in, in some, in a pace th
at is acceptable to you, so you can take step by step by step so they can get to be ready for an engineering school. Things like this are happening everywhere in India. Now, in the Akshaya Patra case, which is more dramatic, because it's physical, tangible, you can see, we are, the foods that a child in Bangalore that eats, and what a child eats in Gujarat are very different. Right. One wants sambar sadam, the other wants teplas. We need to customize this. Right. And here we are trying to build
kitchens that can handle a hundred thousand kids at lunch time. I got to build a kitchen that has to make, so if I have to make a hundred thousand kids to be, each kid eats two or three teplas, I got to make three lakh, three hundred thousand in the two hour, three hour time period to go do it. I need to have flour coming in here and we had to have the ghee has to come here, the oil has to come here. And you should see the sophistication of these machines that turn out the teplas in the rate th
at without a human hand touching anything. So whether it is mechanical engineering, whether it is computer science, whether knowledge, whether supply chain things together, it, Akshaya Pathra's kitchens and they are, they are technological marvels. I agree. I'll give you another little example. Sure. We're trying to cook rice for, let's say, a thousand kids. So you cook in this big vessel. Rice being the way it is, when it is cooked, it's nice and soft. If you put all of that 5, 000 kilograms of
rice on it, it'll crush itself and the bottom will be one congealed mess, because the weight of its own. Right. So how do you cook? Sure. So we came up with a technology using superheated steam. So you pump the steam bottom up. And it cooks real time with not having water sitting on it, but with the steam. Wow! Everywhere things like this. Then you come back and think in, in terms of solving a major technical problem. So whether, and similarly to come back and say, dispense things that need to
have, uh, um, controllers, microcontrollers that precisely tell you how much of what to add, what not to add, putting them together. It is a, it is a technical delight to watch this happen. So whether it is, as I was saying, Whether it is in mechanical things or in logistical mapping of how we get these things distributed. It is a, it is a technology has been driving us to go there. That's brilliant. Thanks for sharing that. I would keep that idea in mind, using the steam to cook the rice. I don
't want you to install yourself, you need to be very careful. Yes, that's true. But that, that's, that's so, I would just say that's so cool. Uh, Siva, thank you for sharing that. Artificial intelligence in the last year or so has just taken a different trajectory and a path. And it seems everybody is trying to think what's their AI strategy. I would love to hear and we, the viewers would love to hear from you. Do we have AI strategy for Akshay Patra? And if yes, would you like to share some, um
, bits on Yeah. So The generative AI revolution, chat GPT that we are now starting to use in search, etc., is the latest manifestation of AI. The prior versions of it, machine learning, deep learning, trying to make sure you build data based models, that have been an integral part of Akshaya Patra's strategy always. So, when we are trying to do a 2. 3 million children distribution, We are very heavily data driven. When we have a donor base, when we have, what happens to these children that have
grown up and, and, and graduated? The amount of data that is flowing in, we have always been good at Akshaya Patra, in modeling it and getting it right. Now, with the vast advances that are coming up in, uh, in generative AI, we can set up Customized search and chat. And for example, if I'm a Akshaya Patra marketing person, I'm trying to reach multiple people. The amount of work that I used to need to get this done now becomes rather routine for me to go. So if I'm going into, let me give you a
simple example. I need to get a video recorded and sent to Cisco. Cisco. com. A customized Cisco video for Cisco with Akshaya Prathara, with all the Cisco employees. It's one click of a button right now. If I need to go as I expand my corporate footprint on the marketing end of it, it has become routine for me to be able to develop these customized solutions. On the supply and delivery side of it, governmental interaction is very strong. How do I go create the customized, getting the money due t
o us collected from a Haryana government to a, to a New Delhi government, to a Telangana government, and you would be amazed how useful it is to have somebody else do this work for you. ChatGPT takes care of most of our problems. You can see everywhere, little applications, big applications, we are starting to use AI. And it's a, it's a core part of our, our thinking. Uh, and switching gears, I know blockchain and Web3 used to be the hot topics, uh, a year ago. Uh, and I, I think sometimes it's
still there in, in, in between where there is a focus section who's focusing a lot on that. Do, what do you think? I know there have been a bunch of projects back in India as well. And I know in US where people have tried to use this technology to create transparency and, and also. Create some immediate outcomes or outcomes, which were not reachable otherwise, uh, in nonprofits. For example, if you want to really see the impact, okay, this, this fund reached the farmer and then how did they use
it? I know a project which was done in India where they did it on blockchain and using a token and they were able to track all of that and that created a tremendous amount of, um, Trust with the donors and, and they, and that created more engagement. Yeah. As you just said, the biggest use for blockchain is establishing a accountability, credibility, transparency in all of our transactions. The biggest place where we, we do get that is in our supply chain. Akshaya Pathra's supply chain is very,
very complicated. We get grains from one place from the government. We might want to supplement it with somewhere else. We get vegetable procurement in each locality. We have multiple vendors that we go through. And here we are from the U. S. We need to show them accountability. The money that we sent from here actually went to go do that. Blockchain technology, we used Accenture as a consultant for us. And Bain also did a lot of work for us. Both Bain and Accenture have put together systems. Su
pply chain systems that use blockchain in India for us to be able to accurately track, transact and deliver receipts back to us. So this is already happening. It's been happening now for maybe three or four years already. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Um, I think I would just like go back and read more about it when this is such, such, so, so awesome. Uh, and especially for our viewers, you know, because we are always, uh, so keen to understand, okay, how that money is getting used
and, uh, is it reaching the right hands in the right manner and what the kind of impact. So this is awesome. Uh. For us, just to finish that thought. Yeah. Akshaya Pathra USA, the board is the fiduciary responsible third person for our donors. IRS expects us. To make sure that the money has reached some place and our donors are not given the permission to exactly direct it. Only the board of Patra USA are doing it for us to get the accountability. They use certificates every time back. We sent
this money. Where was it used? How was it used? Show me the receipts back. The technology has been tremendously useful. That's brilliant. Wow. Thank you for setting that example for everybody, uh, Siva and Akshay Patra, for sure, the entire team. Uh, so inspiring and having such a tremendous impact at a global stage. Thank you. I know you're a very busy person. Uh, you are doing a lot of things and all brilliant things. So much to learn from you. How do you balance your technology and philanthro
pic efforts? So you start from, as I was telling you, where your passion is. In India, especially in the rapidly urbanizing India, where people are moving from villages into larger urban centers, you're starting to see the upheaval that it's causing. In security, in food, shelter, everything that is happening. It's happening. Women, young girls are the worst affected of it. They get displaced and they don't have the ability to go to school and learn. And you watch that happening state at a time,
especially as you move into the middle of the country, coming, starting at Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand. You can see this happening and you go back and say, Oh, my God, what can we do to make sure there are opportunities on one side? On the other side, you are in this country and you're looking at the global scale of problems. Energy storage. What do we do about global warming? How do I work on the chip industry where localization technologies are possible? You now need to balan
ce your left and right brain. Your left brain says, I have to be very logical, I got da, da, da, da. Your right brain says, when I got this much time, I got to go help places where we need to go. So you juggle. This morning, as a matter of fact, 7 o'clock in the morning, I'm out there, we have the CEO of Akshaya Patra, Naveen Goel, and they are going through. Okay. This year's objectives. One by one by one by one. Let's go. Just like you do in this, in my, in my job here, making sure we are alig
ned. Wow. You come back, you are running a big corporation that you need to be get ready for. Yeah. Come the evening, you can go call the Akshaya Patra India folks to come back and say, okay, what is it that your expansion plans are? How do we make sure it is organized? . So the idea here is, I have only one skill set, which is how do I manage multiple people to go get things done. I'm constantly trying to figure out where can I apply it. So I'm a tool looking for a nail to hit. Wherever there i
s a nail, I get to go do it. I agree. What would you advise? The gen Z's and the gen alpha coming up, uh, today, uh, because I feel the generation today is so empathetic and I am seeing there's a lot of energy where people, uh, the generation wants to do something for the society. In fact, whoever it is, I talked to in my circle, uh, especially the younger ones, they are like, you know, please involve us. What would you tell them? I have children and Gen Z's and I see that at home. They feel a g
reat deal. They see what's around the world and they have great feeling. Feelings turn into emotions. These emotions are what cause actions to change. The world moves because of young people with emotions. That's the biggest mover in the whole world is young people who are energetic. When their emotions cause action, the world changes. What we need to however, is to make sure we channel those emotions the proper way. Young people by nature are going to be emoting about something one today, somet
hing else tomorrow and something else the next day. We need to make sure they see what have been constant problems in our society. Global warming needs to be fixed. It's a big, ongoing change that needs to be done. Inequality in the world is a problem. We do need to fix this. And they feel it. They are really into it. So our job is to make sure we, Gently, without telling them how to do it. Nudge them to see the problems and what possibilities are. Get involved. The only thing I can tell them is
, that emotion that can lead to action, don't waste it. I want to make sure, you know what's possible. Everywhere. Just a little bit of engagement. Getting out of staring at the screen, and doing it . in action outside. It does not take a lot. And once they get into it, philanthropy will take them in naturally. That is 100 percent agree with that. And I feel emotions. There is a structure as well. I'm not sure. You might have heard about it as think, feel, and do. How people think, feel, and fin
ally that relates to the action. And we do, I'm a product leader, so I do this when I'm doing journey mapping and user journeys and we all Map it in terms of what is someone thinking? How are they feeling? And then eventually how it leads to the action. So, so I completely agree on that. The next question Siva for you is what are the top priorities Akshaya Patra is focusing on, uh, at a national and at a global stage? Akshaya Patra, the nicest thing about is the simplicity of the mission. Akshay
a Patra does not get distracted. There is always Request from us to go say, Hey, can you do this more? Can you do this more? Can you go? Can you, can you change from, from energy into education and food into education? Can you do something else? Can you be a distributing agent for health? All those questions come to us. We have a tremendous infrastructure and a tremendous reach, but we have one purpose, which is to feed everything that is built around making sure that child gets a nutritious mea
l. Everything else will fall in place. Schools health will all will fall in place. Having said that, we do look at that food and nutrition holistically. For example, one of the areas we are looking at is expectant mothers and early childhood infants. How do we make sure that in the distribution, in the channels where we are, how do we make sure expectant mothers are well taken care of? And these infants, right now, our focus is always after five years, six years, when they are in school, kinderg
arten and up above, we are feeding them all the way through high school. But what about those early formative years? Anganwadis, how do we make sure that we are, we are, we are feeding the children who are much younger? We're trying to reach, we are trying to experiment to go do it. We do need to do it. Very, very needed area for us to go do it. That's in India. The second thing we are trying to do is currently, The kitchens are structured in a way that we can really address only the semi urban
areas, meaning the government has regulations on us. You cannot serve outside of a 45 kilometer radius of where the kitchen is. So if I have to have scale, I can only do an area around the periphery of a city that I can hit a lot of schools there. How do I go to a village school that is far away? I need to have micro kitchens. Right. Kitchens where I can figure out how to use local ingredients, local labor to go serve in schools that are farther away. We have to innovate. We have to innovate a s
upply chain model and a model of delivery to make sure that happens. The third is, this is an area that is a lot of interest to me. We are connected to India. We work a lot. We have an emotional connection back to India. Our children and as they grow bigger in, in, in the U. S., they don't have the same kind of emotional connection we have with a problem in India. I need for them to see something locally that we need to do. So in my own mind, I'm, I'm churning on this idea of, okay, it's very ha
rd for me to break into schools in the U. S. because the regulations are very tight. But we know insecurity around. Community colleges, early, late, late schools. How do we make sure we are at this? And we are starting to, to experiment with those. Similarly with food recovery in the U. S. So much food gets wasted. How do I recirculate it and get it back to the people we are trying to? So, 90 percent of our effort goes into our main purpose, which is feed the school children. We've already made
a commitment to 2. 3 million children. I want to not ever break. I'd never want to have one child come back and say, Oh my God, I was waiting for my food and I didn't get my food. That's my number one priority. But then immediately afterwards, I'm looking to see pregnant women, early infant level feeding. Then I am trying to see where else can I replicate and run this model. And then I'm trying to come and do something in the US. On the reverse side of it, in the US that's interesting is, I want
to give that opportunity to the youth that you're talking about. How do I engage? Right. The way we have done this, and has done this very, very effectively, is to have local chapters. at a grassroots level that are growing. Akshaya Pathra used to raise money originally from high net worth individuals who are doing philanthropy. It's a very important source of fund for us. However, what we are finding now we have a more sustainable source is truly grassroots organization where I get young peopl
e, people in different parts of the country, Kansas City. Or Austin, or Tampa, or Buffalo, New York, or Sioux City, when we are going everywhere across the country, North, South, East, West, and starting to have chapters. And they are all coming and starting to say, Hey, how do I contribute? How can our young people get engaged? It is very, very gratifying to see how well the grassroots. organizations have gone. So that's been a priority for me to make sure that this view is available for the yo
uth around the country. That is so awesome to hear, you know, building a community, bringing in everybody together. Everybody has a role and has an intention and, and that's so beautiful. So thank you for sharing those priorities with us, uh, Siva .
Um, the one last question for you today is, what are you most grateful in life? There is a lot that I'm grateful. Just the thought that here we are, a kid who grew up in rural South India can be sitting here in a corporation in the U. S. and having a
conversation and have the opportunity to give back. But I think the most I'm grateful for is my family. And it says, cliche to say it, my wife and my kids who are, and by the way, I'm this year, I just became a grandfather and those are, thank you. Those are things that I'm grateful for, but in all of those, the fact that all of us are still engaged in being able to give back that we have been fortunate enough to have enough to give back, I'm immensely grateful. Thank you for sharing that. Than
k you. Um, and thank you Siva for this opportunity to, for me to be part of this podcast as well. And I'm so grateful that I get to serve, uh, and be with an amazing team. I know Geeta is here and, uh, and I have whoever I have met just my own personal experience and I'm a volunteer at Akshaya Patra. Whoever I have met so far in the team, they have touched me profoundly and I have so many stories to share. And I'm so grateful to be able to talk to everybody today via this medium and share, bring
this to wider audience. So I hope this was as inspiring as was for me to everybody. We hope to take this to in your home, in your kitchen, wherever you are. I hope there is a bit of information which inspired you. And now you would. take this as a step further, maybe pay it forward, uh, or get involved. Um, do reach out if you would like to get involved and we will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much. Have a great, great rest of your day. See you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Comments
Awesome insightful!