Annakshetra Foundation Trust

Established in November 2010 by the Centre for Development Communication (CDC), Jaipur, Annakshetra Foundation Trust is a non-profit which collects unused surplus food left over after weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties and other socio-religious functions (much of which would otherwise be wasted) and makes it available to those in need through a network of volunteers. It is the first organisation of its kind in India, which has taken up an initiative towards “Zero Food Wastage.”

Annakshetra believes top priority should be given to reduction of food wastage. After many socio-religious functions, a lot of food is found to be wasted by guests or remain unused as surplus. Annakshetra seeks to reuse the surplus food by donating it to needy people who do not get two square meals a day. Where re-use is not possible, Annakshetra tries to recycle and recover waste food through by-product recycling, anaerobic digestion and composting.

The organisation makes extensive use of its website to carry out its activities. The website has enabled the organisation to build awareness, facilitate training programs, reduce costs, raise funds, manage information, disseminate information, communicate with personnel and avoid travel costs. Owing to its website, Annakshetra is benefiting from Google Adwords. At present the popularity of the website is enabling it to make full use of the $10,000 per month ($329 per day) sanctioned to it by Google for ad words. It claims that each day, $329 gets exhausted by 3 pm by the clicks that the website receives. The Annakshetra website is being accessed from across the globe and visitors share lots of ideas, thoughts and views through Email, twitter and Facebook.

Through its offline and online activities, Annakshetra has so far been able to serve more than 1 million meals to poor people saving as much as Rs 30 million.