How breakfast for children started at Lotus Petal

Each one of us at one time or the other has experienced pangs of hunger. We all know the feeling. When we started our education interventions, the one thing we knew for sure was that proper nutrition for our students must be a priority. So, since Day 1 of commencing our own classes, a mid-day meal has been provided to the students. In the beginning, every single day the children would receive a meal which would come to the school and be served to them around 11.30am-12pm.

In December 2014 in a business trip to the IKEA office in Almhult, Sweden changed my outlook on adequate nourishment. A long trip that started late night from Delhi followed by a short layover in Vienna, an onward flight to Copenhagen, and then a train ride to reach my destination in Almhult. I went straight into a meeting for which had done a thorough preparation and was eagerly anticipating. I found myself lacking concentration and distracted. All I could focus on was the pressing sense of hunger I was experiencing. Sitting in that conference room I realized that it was not having had a meal in the morning that was causing my discomfort. It was a moment of truth.

Forever connected in my heart with the children of our school, my mind immediately exclaimed ‘If I am experiencing these sensations at this stage in life, it must be so difficult for small children hailing from underserved backgrounds to sit for classes right in the morning without a meal’. Post the meeting, the first call I made was to the Lotus Petal team. I explained how we need to work towards ensuring that we are providing the students with a nutritious meal at the start of the day.

I knew that the children who were coming to us for learning were typically slum residents. In their households the parents tend to leave early and whatever little they do get as a meal, can really not be categorized as a nutritious breakfast. So, as a team, we set an intention of being able to provide our children with a healthy breakfast.

However, utterly strapped for funds, we had no money to spare for the initiation of a breakfast program. Yet we decided to start at least for a week or so.

At that time we used to share our current premises in Silokhera village with a boys PG hostel which had a small kitchen for the preparation of meals. We requested them to allow us some time in the kitchen and started giving the children poha (flattened rice), a banana and a bottle of milk. Within a few days the universe conspired in our favor and a kind benefactor, a resident of Gurugram who lived nearby, came to us with the intent of helping underprivileged children. She provided a donation which was enough to cover breakfast expenses for the year.

Ecstatic, we developed the breakfast program with full gusto. We have incorporated fortified milk, nutritious fruits and healthy cooked meals into the program for over 5 years now. The health parameters of our students have shown tremendous improvement over the years.

The significance of breakfast as a meal has recently also been established by the new National Education Policy 2020. We are glad to have incorporated such an initiative as our focus has always been on well-rounded development, of which nutrition is a key component, rather than just education – all thanks to that meeting in Sweden!