Midday Meal Scheme

Food-being one of the essential items of survival is sometimes not received by the poor and they suffer just because of the richer ones who waste the food knowing that there is already a shortage of food. Hence, the government of India initiated a program to provide nutritious food to poor school-aged children nationwide. The program provided free food for the government school students during their lunchtime which was called the midday meal scheme. The scheme is supported under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the National Child Labour Project run by the Labor Ministry of India. The scheme is one of the world’s largest because it serves 120,000,000 students in over 1,265,00 school and education guarantee scheme centers.

The first start of the scheme was in Tamil Nadu in 1995 where 68 lakh malnourished were given free food from the government for their speedy recovery. Gujrat was the second state to take the initiative of the scheme and was followed by many different states like Goa, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh which got international aid. In most of the states, the government also provided dry rations to the students and even to the families of those poor students. There were 2 models used to establish the scheme the decentralized and centralized model looking at infrastructure, hygiene, security and partnerships, collaborations, and testing of food by the Human Resource Dept.

Article 24(2)(c) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child has committed to providing nutritious food but later the program was changed in 1995 and was converted to the National Food Security Act, 2013. The vision of the scheme was to feed the weaker section who don’t get proper education and food, get students to enroll in schools for proper education, according to the guidelines of the scheme to provide children with 450 calorie diet and 12gm protein, to increase the attendance of the students and to make children understand why schooling is important in their future.

Many challenges were faced during the implementation of the scheme as the poor quality of food making children ill and some news reports about the insects in food and the tastelessness of food which resulted in either the death of the child or parents not sending them to school, discrimination based on caste; the upper being denies eating the food that was made by the lower class and doing corrupted practise by not providing salt in chapattis and pulses. The vision of the scheme undermines the challenges of the scheme.

To conclude, many states have happily executed the scheme under the guidance of the chief ministers and have been successful in solving their challenges with utmost priority. Hence, the Midday meal is a way to cope with problems for students.

By: Himanshu Arora