The Mid-day Meal Scheme is the name given to the school meal programme in India started in the 1960's. It provides the provision of free lunch to all the school going children. The key objectives of the programme are:
The Scheme was initiated in Tamil Nadu by K.Kamaraj government in 1960s and then was further expanded by M.G.Ramachandran in 1982. This Scheme has now been implemented in all the states after the Supreme Court issued direction for the same. The tremendous increase in the number of enrolments and the expansion of this scheme by opening up new schools and setting up new channels supply of mid day meals.
The State of Karnataka introduced the stipulation of cooked meals in June 2002. Since then there has been great private participation in this area of operation. One of the successful of the ventures is "Akshaya Patra", which started with guidance from ISKCON in the Bangalore community. The Foundation gets a amount from the State government but meets a major share of its costs with contributions from private corporations and persons in the city.
The programme is managed with an especially modern centralised kitchen that is run through a public/private joint venture. Food is delivered to schools in sealed and heat retaining containers just before the lunch break every day. The programme contains one of the best menus in school meal programmes in India with tasty vegetables, rice and some curd on most days.
Since the achievement of this programme private sector participation in mid-day meals has increased significantly. The major donors are corporations such as Infosys, Bharti and Jindal . This model has been successfully simulated in rural Karnataka, Delhi, Hyderabad and other cities.
The foundation is now helping mid-day meals to almost a million children every day and hopes to feed over 20 million children by 2020.
In regard to the Programme there was a bifurcation of the input costs and thus it was decided that the Grains will be provided free of cost by the Government of India and the States will bare the costs of other ingredients, salaries and infrastructure. Since most State governments were reluctant to commit budgetary funds they just approved on the grains from Government of India to the parents. This system was called stipulation of 'dry rations'. On November 28, 2001 the Supreme Court of India gave a famous track that made it compulsory for the state governments to provide cooked meals as a substitute of 'dry rations'. The course was to be implemented from June 2002, but was dishonoured by most States. But with continuous pressure from the court, media and in particular from the Right to Food Campaign more and more states started providing cooked meals.
In May 2004 a new federation government was formed in the centre, which promised universal provision of cooked meals which will be fully funded by the centre. This undertakes in its Common Minimum Programme was followed by improved financial support to the states for cooking and construction of adequate infrastructure. Given this added support the scheme has extended its reach to cover most children in primary schools in India. In 2005 it is expected to cover 130 million children.
120 million children are covered under the Mid-day Meal Scheme, which makes it the largest school lunch programme in the world. The central Allocation for this programme has been increased from Rs 3010 crore to Rs 4813 crore (Rs 48 billion 1.3 million) in 2006-2007.
The EUREKA Moment..!!
There is an interesting story Behind the Mid day Meal Programme. The spark is said to have occurred in a small village called Cheranmahadevi in Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu. K Kamaraj was a very prosaic person. He used to travel in his own car and loved to visit new places.
On one such journey, He had to wait at a railway intersection and thus stopped and looked outside. He saw a few boys with their cows and goats. He then inquired one small boy, "What are you doing with these cows? Why didn't you go to school?" The boy immediately replied, "If I go to school, will you give me food to eat? I can learn only if I eat." The boy's retort sparked the entire process into establishing the mid-day meal programme.
Another state Kerela has Mid day Meal programme computerized. Kerela has all its dealings online and thus enabling accurate accounting.
A Major enhancement in this area is in Gujarat that has had it since 1980. Madhya Pradesh and Orrisa have also implemented the scheme with their own small pockets. There are certain flaws in the implementation of the scheme:-
Quality of Mid day Meal served in the schools
The absence of qualified teachers
The quantity of meal available for mid day meal
MOBILIZATION
Mid day meal has been a success in mobilizing the residents of the various villages and cities of this country to send their children to school regularly in order to suffice their need of food which the family is seldom able to satisfy.
The families below poverty line (BPL) have mid day meal as a great support in order to satisfy the food requirements of the family as a whole. As the children go to school and have lunch there, their part of the food is left for another member of the family.
Also the food given in the mid day meal program adheres to the nutrition level requirements of the children and help them in steady and healthy growth. Thus we can say that the mid day meal has mobilized the people to send their children to school in the following ways:-
Enabling balance in the food requirements of the family
The facility of home pick and drop for the children has helped the children to regularly visit the school in spite unavailability of the parents due to work pressures
The nutrition value of the meal is appropriate which motivates regular attendance to the schools
The inclusion of female students lead to an increase in the gender equality in education
There is a trend towards sending the children to school influenced by the people who already send their children to schools in favour of the mid day meal programme. There is a contagious effect in the process of increasing the number of children sent to school. The poor and backward people treat the scheme as a support to their food requirement also enabling their children to get education so as to find and implement their own livelihood. The primary education schools have experienced a steady increase in the number of enrolments and thus imparting the basic education to a vast population at the cost of the Mid Day Meal.
The preparation of Mid Day Meal is done by the committee formed within the village and it helps in creation of livelihood within the village. This committee takes care of the foods which are nutritious and healthy for the children. The committee gets the benefit of government services as they serve the school by preparing the Mid Day Meal. The people employed here get wages directly under this scheme. Also the old and the unable are able to get sustainable livelihood from this scheme. The scheme while employing people also takes care of the migration that happens from the villages to the nearby towns and villages. Right from procurement to the preparation of the mid day meal there is a contribution of a number of villagers who depend on the scheme for their livelihood.
The procurement of vegetables is done from the village as well as from the market nearby (in major areas). This also maintains the demand of the vegetables in the village, motivating more people to cultivate vegetables (not general, and specific to the visited areas of Madhya Pradesh). The children who attend the schools for the mid day meal are having better health conditions than the children who do not attending the schools regularly.
The Mid Day Meal programme creates awareness in regard to the differentiation on the basis of caste and creed which affected the schools earlier. The children from various backgrounds sit together in the school and take the benefit of the mid day meal programme. This is influencing the social taboos associated with the concept of children of different castes and sections of the society to study together.
There has also been a decrease in the number of children who migrate to the nearby towns and cities in search of a job and end up performing as "Child Labourers". The hand to mouth condition of the family forces the children to step out of their protective homes and move on the work and support their families for livelihood purposes. The security of getting proper nutritional food in the school has motivated the children as well as their parents to send the children to schools. This helps in maintaining the minimum nutritional level for the children as well as it supports the family to conserve some of the daily food requirement. The exploitation of children by the city contractors and daily wages concept had decreased and this has given more space to the families belonging to the below poverty line to have a say in the option of livelihood and securing a future of their children.
Another important effect of the mid day meal programme which is mobilizing the villagers is the Participation of girl students in the programme. The number of female enrolments has moved up drastically. The importance of girl education is also prominent with the help of "Equal education drive" that went along all the villages around the country and helped in motivating the parents to send their girl child to school equivalent to their male child.
The Contagion Theory of collective action plays an important role in the functioning of the mid day meal scheme. People tend to send their children to school when they see their neighbours and their relatives sending their children to schools. The quality of the mid day meal needs to be taken into consideration as it directly affects the health of the children as well as affect the implementation of the programme at a major level. The quality could be maintained by appointing trained and knowledgeable staff for the preparation of the mid day meal. The inclusion of villagers will create a sense of belonging and thus will help in maintain and the betterment of the quality of the food served in the programme.
The menu of the scheme also needs to be changed, this can be done by forming a committee at the village level which will decide the menu of the meal that needs to be prepared and thus the interest of the children will be maintained in the food as well as the interest to come to the school and have one time meal.
NEED FOR MOBILIZATION
There are certain aspects of the scheme which need the mobilization effect and are still far way from reaching the ears of the masses. The mid day meal programme has been able to mobilize people to send their children to school in various parts of the country. The meal has been able to attract the hungry masses to the schools but certain issues still make it dark to comment upon.
The various factors that need mobilization and assured attention are:-
The formation of committee regarding the selection of menu for the mid day meal programme
The quality inspection - for the maintenance of quality food given to the students
Inclusion of more number of children to the schools
Formation of new learning centres so that to increase the span of the programme
The inclusion of higher classes under this scheme in order to facilitate and promote higher education in the rural areas of the country
These aspects will play important role in defining the future action plan for the scheme as well as will help in reducing poverty and undulation in the most backward areas of the country. The education level of the children will enable them to find manageable jobs within and outside the villages and thus will contribute in the development of the village and then the country as a whole.
The awareness towards the importance of education and the strong belief in the scheme will benefit the implementation of the scheme. The parents need to understand the importance of education and feel the sense of personal benefit when participating in the scheme as the mid day meal scheme.
Another important reason to mobilize people in order to send their children to schools to study and to eat is the increasing level of Malnutrition in the country.
Malnutrition:-
While India runs the major child feeding program in the world, it is inadequately implemented and designed, and has made barely an impression in the position of sick children in the past 10 years.
The $1.3 billion Integrated Child Development Services program, India's prime effort to fight malnutrition, funds a network of kitchens in urban slums and villages. Indian program has not homed in on them effectively. Nor has it succeeded in satisfactorily changing child feeding and hygiene practices. Women remain in ill health and are ill fed, they have poor health condition.
In a tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the dare on stark display. Shortly after crack of dawn, in a rented room along a slender alley, an all-female gang prepared giant vats of pungent rice and lentil porridge. The porridge was laden onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that scrutinize and help at-risk children and their mothers all over the neighborhood.
It went well everywhere, except that at one - known in Hindi as an Anganwadi - the instructor was a no-show. At another, there were no children; but, a few adults sauntered up with their lunch pails. At a third, the nursery worker said that 13 children and 13 lactating mothers had already come to claim their servings, and that now she would have to fill the bowls of everybody who came along from the neighborhood. People from neighborhood said give us the porridge otherwise we will curse you badly.
Not even a single center had a working scale to weigh children and to recognize the weak ones, a decisive part of the nutrition program.
The nurseries were largely omitted the needs of those most at risk: children under 2, for whom a dry ration of flour and ground lentils was offered, containing none of the micronutrients a weak infant needs.
In a message prepared in February, the Ministry of Women and Child Development recognized that while the program had yielded some gains in the past 30 years, "its impact on physical growth and development has been rather slow." The report recommended stimulating food with micronutrients and educating parents on how to feed their babies in a better fashion.
A World Food Program report last month noted that India remained home to, 230 million people more than a fourth of the world's hungry in all. It also found anemia to be on the rise among rural women of childbearing. Indian women are often the last to eat in their homes and often improbable to eat well or rest during pregnancy. India is ranked below two dozen sub-Saharan countries on its Global Hunger Index.
NAANDI FOUNDATION- - An important mention in regard of Mid Day Meal
Naandi Foundation is one of the major and highest growing social sector organisations in India working to make poverty history. In its effort to eliminate poverty it has been operational in the fields of Child rights, Education, Sustainable livelihoods, Midday meal and Safe Drinking water since last decade.
To accomplish the motto towards eradicating poverty Naandi took its first action towards banishing hunger through its Midday meal programme. In partnership with state governments and all the way through corporate donations Naandi runs several programmed central Midday Meal Kitchens across the country. These kitchens organize and distribute high-nutrition noon meals to lakhs of deprived children every day. Naandi even delivers Midday meal in many tribal areas across its project areas in 4 states which include Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. With a highly refined centralised kitchen Naandi delivers food to nearly 8 lakhs children in every working days. The Midday Meal menu is decided in discussion with nutritionists from the National Institute of Nutrition. Feedback and suggestions from particular government school teachers are taken into contemplation for further improvement. For locations such as Hyderabad, Naandi uses Global Positioning System (GPS), where they acknowledged and mapped all the schools to resolve the best possible way to transport food.
Naandi in partnership with the Government of Rajasthan (GoR) initiated the Hunger-Free programme on 1 May 2006 by providing cooked meals to the poorest of the poor at a very nominal price apart from its Midday meal programme.
Hunger, I feel, is the worst misfortune of being poor. Not having an idea as from where the next meal is coming from day after day is a horror not many of us have experienced. But, unluckily millions do, everyday.
For parents, the most painful thing in the world is a hungry child at home, nothing brings them down to their knees like a hungry child at home, and who refuses to drink water again and again for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner. It is no astonish then that the number of malnourished and starving children in India is more than that in Sub-Saharan Africa.
THE BLACK MARKS -SCAMS
There have been various black marks i.e. scams that have hampered the image of the scheme.
In January 2006, the Delhi Police founded a scam in the Mid-Day Meal Scheme. In December 2005, the police had held eight truckloads (2,760 sacks) of rice meant for primary schoolchildren being passed from Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns in Bulandshahr District of UP to North Delhi. When the police jailed the trucks, the drivers claimed that the rice was being brought all the way to Delhi to be treated at a factory. However, according to the guidelines, the rice has to be taken directly from FCI godown to the school or village in particular. Later it was found that the rice was being siphoned off by a UP-based NGO, in responsibility with the government officials.
In November 2006, the residents of Pembong village (around 30 km from Darjeeling), accused a group of teachers of embezzling mid-day meals. In a formal written complaint, the residents claimed that there was no availability of the mid ay meal from the past 18 months to feed the children at the schools in the village.
In December 2006, The Times of India reported a scam linking government schools that siphon off food grains under the mid-day meal scheme by inappropriate attendance. The modus operandi of the schools was simple -- the attendance register would overstate the number of students enrolled in the class. The added students would not exist -- they were "enrolled" to get supplementary food grains which were kept as black by the school staff. The scam was uncovered when P Asha Kumari, who is an assistant teacher at the government primary school, Jakkur, in Yelahanka acted as a protagonist. She informed the Lok Ayukta, who conducts probe and indicates four persons for misappropriation. The whistleblower was besieged by the school staff and pleaded for a transfer. She was shifted as transfer to a government primary school at Cholanayakahalli, where she again found the same modus operandi being used to siphon off the food grains. She again complained to the Lok Ayukta, And thus a notice was issued to the school concerned.
CRITISICM
The scheme has to undergo some criticism as there are various loopholes present in the system and design of the scheme enabling scams and thus huge loss in investment outputs.
Despite the success of the program, child starvation as a problem persists in India. According to current statistics, under the age of 5, 42.5% of the children are underweight. This is due to straightforward reasons such as not using iodized salt. "India is home to the world's largest food unconfident population, with more than 200 million people who are hungry," High levels of child under-nutrition and poor calorie count adds to the poor performance of the country in India State Hunger Index (ISHI),Its states that the level of child malnutrition in India is higher than most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
