Darkness at Noon
The Centre’s midday meals scheme is one of the most successful programmes, despite the leakages and problems inherent in the Indian governmental delivery system, as studies by a number of agencies including Prof Amartya Sen’s Pratichi Trust, the Planning Commission and Supreme Court Commissioners show. These studies found that there has been increased school attendance and retention, fall in dropout rates, and an improvement in academic performance of students.
Apart from the nutritious food, students have benefited from good practices such as washing hands before and after meals, children of different communities eating together and socializing, and providing great support to parents by providing one meal to the child. The Planning Commission found specifically that the programme has been successful in dealing with classroom hunger and creating a platform for children of all backgrounds to take meals together, facilitating social equity.
However, shortcomings in the scheme have also been observed such as adulteration of food grain by suppliers, unhygienic cooking conditions (as now also seen in Goa) and the low rate paid by the Central government per child. The Goa government was earlier spending Rs 3.83 per child at the primary level, which has now been increased in both primary and upper primary levels. But six-odd rupees per child is still abysmal by any standards, as evidenced by the flak drawn by Congress leaders for saying that one can get meals for Rs 12 or Rs 5 in a metro such as Mumbai or Delhi. Given that full meals are subsidised to be sold at Rs 12 in canteens MPs have access to, their statements since withdrawn are perhaps only reflective of living in a make-believe world alien to the country’s poor.
Goa, which prides itself with relatively better education and health standards, has had to bear the ignominy of regular incidents of children falling ill after consuming midday meals. On August 8, 2009 at Yuvak Sangh High School at Sada, Vasco, 18 students fell ill. At the the Mallikarjun Vidyalaya, Canacona, on June 19 this year 86 students of were affected after consuming midday meals. And in the latest incidents on June 25, 23 students of St Joseph High School Usgao were taken ill. Earlier this week 19 students of Kamleshwar High School Korgao-Pernem fell ill shortly after their mid-day meals.
This is an embarrassing record for a small State where 85 per cent of the population is literate. After assuming office in March last year, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar had promised that by Diwali that year, the midday meal scheme would be sorted out. A year on, things have not changed as Goans would have wanted. The scheme, which was to attract students to school, is slowly but surely becoming a nightmare to manage with certain school managements and gram sabhas boycotting it. The time delay of over one year to fix the problem is not acceptable, however troublesome the year may have been given the other issues the State government is dealing with. It is, after all, a question of priorities.
No evaluation of the scheme appears to have been completed. The managerial monitoring of the scheme by the department has been a disaster, with the ball sought to be pushed into the teachers’ or the PTAs’ court. No procedure for monitoring seems to be laid out such as putting in place vigilance squads (which are monitored by zilla parishads in some states). The Supreme Court Commissioners themselves have suggested that proper infrastructure for midday meals should be mandatory, including cooking sheds, storage, drinking water and clean utensils, besides community participation in the monitoring of the midday meal to prevent corruption and ensure quality. They suggest that midday meals should be integrated with school health services, including immunization, de-worming, growth monitoring, health checkups and micro-nutrient supplementation.
Centralized kitchens such as those in Belgaum with high hygiene standards and strict monitoring can be explored as an alternative to individual monitoring of SHGs spread across the State. Other options too could be explored by evaluating the scheme in Goa, and fixing the nagging problem by treating it as a top priority.
