ISKCON to run Anna canteens again in Andhra, provide mid-day meals in Telangana

The Andhra Pradesh government on Thursday, August 15 relaunched the Anna Canteens, which had been shut down between 2019 and 2024 by the previous government led by the YSR Congress Party. Anna Canteens will serve hot cooked meals at a subsidised price. However, the canteen kitchens will be run by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

In Telangana, the newly elected Congress led state government has collaborated with ISKCON for the mid-day meal scheme. While Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader RS Praveen Kumar criticised the scheme for its ‘sattvic’ diet, the BRS had also roped in ISKCON in the past to provide five-rupee meals for patient attendants at 18 state-run hospitals.

The relaunch of the Telugu Desam Party’s (TDP) flagship programme, announced by Municipal Administration and Urban Development (MAUD) Minister Ponguru Narayana on August 13, was one of the promises made by the TDP-JSP-BJP alliance before the state Assembly elections, results for which were announced on June 4. The alliance won 164 out of the 175 Assembly seats in the state.

“The Harekrishna movement [a colloquial reference to the ISKCON group] has 12 kitchens in Andhra Pradesh. The state government has decided to harness these kitchens to start 100 canteens on Independence Day. The previous YSRCP government had stopped these canteens and used some of the premises as village and ward secretariats or for other purposes,” Minister Narayana said, criticising the previous government. He added that between 2014 and 2019 – the last time TDP governed Andhra – 4 crore meals were supplied to around 2,25,000 people.

While ISKCON has in the past worked with various state governments to implement the Akshaya Patra mid-day meal scheme in government schools, it has been criticised for not including eggs, meat, and fish, which could worsen malnutrition levels among impoverished students. Aside from nutrition, ISKCON has also been pulled up for relegating meat and eggs to the domain of ‘untouchability’ in pursuit of ‘higher living’, which has time and again been dubbed as a casteist view of food.

The menu released by the Andhra MAUD ministry for Anna Canteens reads: “For breakfast, idli will be served with chutney, gunpowder or sambar or puri with curry; for lunch and dinner, rice, sambar, dal, vegetables, and curd will be served.”

Speaking to TNM, public health researcher and activist Dr Sylvia Karpagam said that the Akshaya Patra mid-day meal scheme was pushed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in some states.

“But it isn’t just the BJP. In Karnataka, the Congress government had halted BJP’s scheme of providing eggs. Also, a few religious groups like the Lingayat community opposed the concept of feeding eggs to children,” she added.

In Karnataka, the exclusion of eggs led to malnutrition among children, as nutrients like Vitamin A, B12, zinc, and iron were lacking. A study showed that the nutrition levels improved significantly when the state government started serving eggs daily to government school children from 2022 onwards.

Also read: Why six eggs a week in Karnataka mid-day meal scheme is a welcome move