The Akshaya Patra Foundation made waves at the recently held PAN IIT conference in Chicago. Amongst the 2000 delegates attending the conference, were Sri Desh Deshpande, an IIT alumni and an accomplished IT professional, and his wife, Jaishree.

 Sri Deshpande is also the Chairman of TAPF in America.

Although disappointed, Sri Deshpande was looking forward to hearing President Bill Clinton’s address as a keynote speaker. “President Clinton had everyone spell bound for 60 minutes!” he tell us. During the talk, President Clinton mentioned Akshaya Patra four times and had the audience abuzz with excitement. Sri Deshpande had mentioned our work to President Clinton in an earlier instance when he had the opportunity to travel with the President and Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to Haiti, in AirForce ONE, to see their Mid Day meal program. “They serve 100 children a day, which looked impressive. But when they learnt about Akshaya Patra serving a million meals a day they were stunned!” It makes us very happy that our work is being recognized at the global level.

We’d like to specially thank Sri Deshpande, Nishith, Madhu, and Ravindra for their many efforts to drill the Akshaya Patra message and position it as the largest mid-day meal program in the world at the Clinton Global Initiative.

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