PUNJAB
 Missing kitchens, stores
 Chitleen K. Sethi

Launch of the scheme

In order to improve enrolment, retention and reduce dropout rate of students in primary classes and to improve the nutritional status of primary students, the government launched National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (mid-day meal scheme) on October 2, 1995, countrywide. Under this scheme, students of primary classes were to be provided wheat at the rate of 3 kg per student per month (for 10 months in a year), subject to 80 per cent attendance initially, and the states were to switch over to providing cooked meal within two years. Following a writ petition filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, the Supreme Court ordered in November 2001:“ We direct the state governments/ union territories to implement the mid-day meal scheme by providing every child in every government and government- assisted primary schools with a prepared mid-day meal with a minimum content of 300 calories and 8-12 gm of protein each day of the school for a minimum of 200 days.”

In rural Punjab where only the poorest of the poor send their kids to government primary schools, it is almost a wonder that the central mid-day meal scheme has actually been implemented and with some measure of success. Currently, the scheme covers almost 14,000 primary schools in Punjab under the scheme and nearly 15 lakh students are being given cooked meals during school hours. The village education development committees (VEDC) and now mothers’ self-help groups are responsible for the monitoring of the scheme in villages.

When the scheme was introduced by the Centre in 1995, every student was to be given 3 kg of grain each month but Punjab failed abysmally in implementing the scheme not due to paucity of funds (as it claims in its official website) but due to sheer lack of bureaucratic will. A former school education secretary of the state even went to the extent of stating that a rich state like Punjab has no shortage of food and has no utility for a mid-day meal scheme.

Another former education secretary Sarvesh Kaushal, however, established that a large percentage of schoolchildren in Punjab were anaemic and needed supplementary nourishment. In Punjab the scheme took off only in July, 2006 when cooked meals started being served to the students.

The system has been streamlined to a large extent leading to improvement in school attendance but there are flaws waiting to be ironed out. Lack of infrastructure like kitchens and storerooms in these schools makes the implementation of the scheme difficult. Firewood is used for cooking the meal. The quality of food being given to the students needs drastic improvement.

Wheat and rice calculated in terms of 100 gm per child per school day is sent to schools each month from the Food Corporation of India through PUNSUP. However, schools do not have proper rooms to store the grain. Cases of this mid-day meal rice and wheat infested with worms, rodents and fungus have been reported from many schools.

In a school in Morinda the grain is stored in a makeshift room, the roof of which leaks every time it rains. During monsoon the firewood stored in the open gets wet and students have to go without a meal.

The quality of grain sent to schools is also questionable. In a Kharar school where on a given day khichdi was being cooked, the quality of rice was the worst that was available.

Also in the absence of kitchens all sorts of nooks and corners are used to cook the food. At Thandroli village in Morinda the food is cooked under a tin sheet in a small corner of the school. In most other schools the food is cooked in the open on mud stoves. In Manakepur Sharif village in Morinda 180 students did not get the their meal as it was raining heavily.

The village level education development committees and the mothers’ self- help groups have sent requisitions to the government for grants to construct kitchens and stores but these are still awaited.

CHANDIGARH
Orderly and methodical
Chitleen K.Sethi

The Chandigarh Administration has fared much better in implementing the scheme ever since it was envisaged in 1995. Since the city is small and more manageable, the administration is following the centralised cooking method. For almost 40,000 students studying in government primary schools, mid- day meal is cooked at three centralised locations chosen by the administration and distributed in schools. The schools as a result do not have to bother about the storage of grains and cooking of food. In some other schools where “children from better households” are studying, cooked food is not served. These students are given mathis during the mid-day meal hour. The mathis are also prepared centrally in some of the city’s own food and hotel management institutes.

The Administration is spending almost Rs 6 crore a year on the implementation of the scheme. The Government of India pays Rs 1.25 crore for the scheme. The Administration is giving rice to the centralised cooking centres and Rs 4.5 per child per day. At the centres where the chapatti meal is prepared, the administration does not give wheat and spends Rs 8 per child per day. “The Administration has now decided that the schools where we are supplying mathis should also be given cooked food,” says UT Director, Public Instruction, Schools, Ashwani Kumar.





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