In India — the World's Largest School Lunch Program

To address the enduring and intertwined problems of hunger, child malnutrition and illiteracy, India runs the Mid-Day Meal Scheme — the largest school-lunch program in the world. Launched nationally in the mid-1990s and made universal by a landmark 2001 Supreme Court order, the program today feeds some 120 million students every day across the nation.

The scheme is simple in concept and staggering in execution: a hot, cooked meal in every government school, every school day. Studies and the government's own audits credit it with raising enrollment and retention, particularly for girls and children from the poorest families — for many of whom the midday meal is the most reliable food of the day. It has also become one of the world's largest experiments in public-private delivery of nutrition.

That is where Akshaya Patra comes in. The Bangalore-based nonprofit is the scheme's largest nongovernmental partner, operating 17 centralized kitchens across eight states and serving hot meals to more than 1.26 million children every school day. It runs on a public-private partnership model, with roughly 65 percent of its funds provided by the government, and it has set itself the goal of feeding 5 million children by 2020.

The organization's work reached an unusual spotlight during Barack Obama's November 2010 visit to India. In his address to the Indian Parliament, Obama called Akshaya Patra "a powerful demonstration of what's possible when people work together" — a rare presidential shout-out to a lunch program.

Problems persist, of course. Audits have repeatedly found irregularities in grain procurement, meal quality varies across states, and the program's enormous scale makes monitoring difficult. But against those failures stands the sheer scale of the achievement: no country has ever attempted to feed this many children, this consistently, as a matter of right.

Time profiled the program and Akshaya Patra in 2010.