MUMBAI - As the world's largest program of its kind, India's
government-sponsored free school lunch scheme sets out to benefit 140 million
children in a million schools across India in 2008, even as it swallows a
regular diet of controversies en route to strengthening child nutrition and
literacy.
Reports, both governmental and otherwise, say the noon-meal scheme has
consistently increased enrollment in schools in India, a country that has 35%
of the world's illiterate population, including 137 million Indian children
unable to read or write.
India's free school lunch scheme - operating with US$1.9 billion in central
government funding besides local state governmental
money - shines like a beacon onto other disquieting reports, such as one from
British-based Lancet medical journal declaring that malnutrition rates among
Indian children are among the world's highest.
The study from Lancent (whose first issue dates to 1823) was released in New
Delhi on May 13 and said that insufficient food caused stunted growth in about
half of India's child population below five years of age.
The Lancet report claiming Indian children account for one-third of the global
population of stunted children is a shameful slap in the face to one of world's
the fastest-growing economies and the fastest-growing list of billionaires and
millionaires. Earlier Lancet studies have praised the impact of the midday
meals in schools, particularly in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
The south Indian state of Tamil Nadu led the way in South Asia in providing
free meals for school children (there is mention of Japan having such schemes
in the 19th century) with a governmental program to feed children in 1926 for a
limited number of schools.
India's noon-meal scheme for children was first pioneered in 1982 by iconic
movie star and Tamil Nadu chief minister M G Ramachandran (1917-1987), the
world's first film hero to head a government. MGR, as he was called, started
the free lunch for school children scheme, ignoring cynics who said it was an
electoral gimmick and economists who said it made little fiscal sense.
MGR, probably the most charismatic Indian movie star ever (he also never lost
an election), said he started the scheme for kids because he had experienced as
a child what it was like to go hungry to school with the family having no money
to buy food. His administration gradually expanded the noon-meal scheme to
cover children up to the age of 15. In 1995, pregnant women were also included
in the plan during their first four months of pregnancy.
Critics of the scheme have long since shut up, more so after studies showed
enrollment in primary schools in Tamil Nadu had risen by 35% from 4.8 million
in 1984-85 to 6.5 million in 2002-03, and dropout rates in middle school
dipping from 24% in 1984-85 to 13.85% in 2002-03. By January 2004, Tamil Nadu
had achieved an adult literacy rate of 73.4%, among the highest in India.
In January 2008, a national conference on human development ranked Tamil Nadu
among the top three states in India, after Kerala and Punjab. A senior
bureaucrat Naresh Gupta attributed Tamil Nadu's growth to various poverty
alleviation and development programs in the state as well as to the noon-meal
scheme. A generation of children in Tamil Nadu had grown into adulthood
benefiting from the hunger-relieving nutritious lunch in school.
The success of Tamil Nadu's noon-meal scheme led to it being replicated in
other states in India, until the government of India adopted it in 1995 to
include central government funding to share local state government costs. In
November 2001, India's Supreme Court instructed state governments to introduce
cooked midday meals in all government and government-assisted primary schools
within six months. The central funding for the noon-meal scheme too increased
every year, to its current budget of US$1.9 billion for 2008-09.
Yet, the noon-meal scheme is regularly in the news for every conceivable type
of controversy - from corruption in diverting funds and material, poor quality
of the food, short-staffed schools forcing teachers to cook the lunch, children
being food-poisoned by a lizard falling into the food, to even parents of
school children occasionally refusing to let their children eat the food
because it was prepared by a "low caste" cook.
Deliberate appointment of cooks from the so-called "low caste" communities is
part of the governmental agenda, according to an official statement on the
scheme. According to the statement, "The midday meal also helps in spreading
egalitarian values, as children from various social backgrounds learn to sit
together and share a common meal. Appointing cooks from Dalit [discriminated]
communities is another way of teaching children to overcome caste prejudices."
The latest noise about the scheme came this summer about whether the cooked
meals should be substituted with high-nutrition biscuits, considering serial
controversies on who cooks the lunch and the food quality. But the biscuit
drive found few takers.
The majority view that children must get at least one freshly cooked hot meal a
day, not just biscuits, was upheld by M Fatmi, union minister of state for
human resource development, who told parliament in March that the government
was not buckling under strong lobbying from biscuit manufacturers, and the meal
scheme would continue to serve hot meals to children.
The program provides a daily meal with a nutritional value of 450 calories and
12 grams of protein for children in classes I-V, and a meal with 700 calories
and 20 grams of protein for children in upper primary classes. Besides rice and chappatis
(small, round unleavened bread), the meal includes pulses, vegetables and
sometimes fruit, depending on local state budgets. The scheme is centrally
monitored, with each school unit required to display menus as well as provide
accounts on demand.
Noon-meal scheme reports consistently show increasing attendance in schools
largely because the program offers an incentive to poverty-stricken parents to
send their children to school for a meal, even if the parents are not yet
convinced about the value of education, particularly in rural India where
poorer families generally believe that working in farms is time better spent
for their kids than in classrooms.
During a childhood summer holiday visit to a village in south India in the late
1970s, this correspondent experienced the disturbing sight of a parent dragging
away his reluctant child from an open school classroom. The school master could
only watch helplessly as the father said the little boy was needed to work in
the fields. Reports now say the noon-meal scheme is even bridging gender
development gaps, with parents also sending their daughters to school, denting
age-old gender bias preventing girls in poorer families from getting an
education.
The Indian government officially lists benefits of the school lunch scheme as
"contributing to improvement in their nutritional status; encouraging poor
children, belonging to disadvantaged sections, to attend school more regularly
and helping them concentrate on classroom activities; providing nutritional
support to children of primary stage in drought-affected areas during summer
vacation".
The benefits are spreading across the country. The western Indian state of Goa
has said that in the past two years the free noon-meal scheme has been
operational, the state has reported a 5% increase in the enrollment of students
in government schools.
More importantly, the governmental effort to provide a nutritious meal for
children is inspiring similar efforts from privately-funded groups, as well as
in public-private partnership schemes. For instance, the Bangalore-based
Akshaya Patra Foundation runs the world's largest donations-based school meal
program, serving 852,000 children daily in government-run schools in India.
Akshaya Patra in Indian mythology is the miracle vessel the sun god Surya gave
to the exiled Pandava princes of the Mahabharata epic, with the vessel
providing a never-ending supply of food to the Pandava princes and the sages
accompanying them.
In the 21st century, Akshaya Patra is a not-for-profit organization with a
baseline "unlimited food for education", an office in the US state of
Massachusetts and an avowed volition to feed a million children by 2010.
Harvard Business School recently released a case study on Akshaya Patra that is
being used as part of MBA curriculum for precise time management, based on the
foundation having engineered its kitchens to prepare 100,000 meals in six
hours, as well as needing only $28 to feed a hungry child for a year.
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