I talked about this in one of my posts earlier, and I am still impressed with the Mid-day meal scheme. We know our education system is a mess, and current Con'gress politicians are busy trying to mess it up further, but the one good story out of all this is the success of the mid-day meal scheme, which, according to some, is the largest in the world.
So for this post, I try to look further into this scheme, how it started, and how it is coming along. Before anything else, I am sure its pretty obvious what the scheme is about. It is about providing midday meals to school children in thousands of schools all across the country, in an attempt to spur parents to send their kids to school, especially the ones who are financially constrained and do not send their children to school simply because they would rather have them work to bring extra money into the household. Despite all the calls for it, and the numerous success stories all across the world, true to its character, Indian governments, both at the center and the states had only reluctantly begun implementing it, despite orders from the Supreme Court of India.
In January 2004, this report was published on the website, 'India Together' titled 'Groundswell for mid-day meal scheme.' As I had thought, there is a lot more to this scheme than just being a scheme that just went right. While the idea has been lingering in the country for a long while, it was only in 2003 that it was taken to the next level, and accorded any importance to it. Please read every word of this long report, it'll make you feel good that at least something is going right in our great nation.
This report is more than 2 years old, and I am sure a lot more states are in the fold now, I will try to look for more recent data on that.
Groundswell for mid-day meal scheme
It’s a measure of the low priority accorded to elementary education in post-independence India that only on July 1, 2003 was the long-standing proposal to provide a free mid-day meal to all students in government primary schools implemented in the southern state of Karnataka (pop. 56 million). After the introduction of its Akshara Dasoha mid-day meal scheme, Karnataka became the eighth of India’s 31 state governments to action this scheme which has universally effected dramatic improvements in school enrollment. However some of the largest states of the Indian Union including Uttar Pradesh (pop. 160 million), Maharashtra (96 million), Bihar (82 million) and West Bengal (80 million) are yet to introduce the free mid-day meal scheme within their administrative jurisdictions.
Free mid-day meals for school students were first introduced in a Japanese private school in the late 1800s, in Brazil in 1938 and in the United States in 1946. With evidently satisfactory results.
Comments the Global School Feeding Report of the United Nation’s World Food Programme: “School feeding programmes often double enrollment within a year and can produce a 40 percent improvement in academic performance in just two years. Children who take part in such programmes stay in school longer and the expense is minimal.”
The reluctance of India’s central planners, policy formulators and educationists to action the free mid-day meal scheme to incentivise parents at the base of the social pyramid to send their children to school is especially surprising. The scheme, first introduced in the southern state of Tamilnadu way back in 1956, has proved remarkably successful in improving school enrollment in that state. Though partially launched in 1956, the mid-day meal programme was given full shape and form by the state’s actor-turned chief minister the late M.G. Ramachandran in 1982. Since then its efficient state-wide implementation has vaulted Tamilnadu into the ranks of the most literate states of the Indian Union (adult literacy: 73.5 percent), an attribute which has endowed this southern state (pop. 62 million) with a shower of benefits including a stable population, steady industrialisation and perhaps the best physical and social infrastructure in the country.
The state government’s budgetary provision for NMP for the year 2003-04 is a relatively sizeable Rs.659.39 crore (2.47 percent of its annual budgetary outlay). Against this modest cost, the benefit has been a dramatic increase in school enrollment in the state — in primary schools it has shot up 31 percent from 5.04 million in 1985-86 to 6.59 million in 2002-03. Moreover in middle school, drop-outs have decreased from 24 to 13.85 percent during the same period.
Quite evidently the Tamilnadu experiment is replicable in other states given political will. A recent study of mid-day meal schemes in three states of the Indian Union — Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Karnataka — conducted by the Centre for Equity Studies of the Delhi School of Economics clearly indicates the nexus between improved student enrollment and retention and the free mid-day meal. A study of 81 schools in which free mid-day meals were introduced in July 2001, indicates class I enrollment rose by 15 percent within the year. Particularly impressive jumps were made in female enrollment in Chhattisgarh (17 percent) and Rajasthan (29 percent).
Given the proven efficacy of the mid-day meal scheme in improving school enrollment and attendance in a society in which an estimated 59 million children in the age-group six-14 are out of school, it is shocking that only half of India’s 31 states provide cooked mid-day meals in schools within their administrative borders, though three states have launched the scheme on a pilot basis in some districts. Seven states with an aggregate population of 400 million don’t provide a cooked meal despite a Supreme Court judgement of 2001 directing all state governments to provide cooked mid-day meals in primary schools within six months.
Though most of the defaulting state governments failed to meet the apex court deadline of May 28, 2002, the governments of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have expanded their mid-day schemes to cover all primary schools administered and aided by them. The recalcitrant states which despite repeated warnings from the Supreme Court have not yet implemented the cooked mid-day meal scheme are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand which host an aggregate population of 275 million citizens of whom 50 percent are comprehensively illiterate.
Approximately Rs.9,000 crore per year is required to implement the free mid-day meal scheme in all government and aided schools countrywide. This seems too large to be affordable, but in reality it’s a small price to pay to reap a potentially monumental socio-economic benefit.
Not surprisingly the dominant sentiment within the ministry of education in Lucknow is sceptical. Department officials concede that if the free mid-day meal scheme could not be implemented in the six most backward districts for lack of funds, it is highly unlikely that it will be implemented in 18 (out of a total of 70) districts in the state.
According to the CES survey (mentioned earlier), the approximate cost to state governments of providing cooked meals for 200 days a year (as stipulated by the Supreme Court) is a mere Re.1 per day per capita because the central government provides grains and cereals from the rotting 65 million tonne foodgrains mountain stored in the makeshift godowns of the public sector Food Corporation of India. Therefore for instance, it would cost the Uttar Pradesh government a mere Rs.300 crore per year to provide mid-day meals to all primary (upto class V) children.
This conspicuous lack will to implement a scheme which offers great cost-benefit advantages is rooted in several socio-economic factors. For one, India’s new tribe of self-perpetuating politicians is subliminally aware that an educated population is certain to demand good governance and accountability from them. Secondly there is a deep-rooted bias in favour of merit-based rather than universal education within the nation’s dominant middle class. Thus while considerable pains are taken to establish excellent institutions of education such as the Kendria Vidyalayas and Jawahar Navodalayas and top-rung private sector schools for high performance primary and secondary students (and the IITs and IIMs for school leavers), there is little interest within governments at the central and state levels to raise universal primary and secondary education standards which would benefit poor citizens at the base of India’s complex and massive social pyramid.
Low rent-earning opportunities apart, a possible cause of the general lack of will within state governments to action the school mid-day meal programme could be lack of confidence about implementing this inevitably massive programme while maintaining minimum quality standards.
The general lack of establishment enthusiasm in some states is also influenced by the widely held belief that the provision of cooked meals disrupts classroom processes. Some media reports suggest that teachers spend too much time supervising culinary operations to the detriment of academic timetables.
The critical importance of decentralising the free mid-day meal to the maximum possible degree has impacted itself upon the educrats of the Union HRD ministry in New Delhi. The ministry is currently proposing the constitution and involvement of independent self-help groups in the form of mothers’ groups in every school offering the scheme.
The bottom line is that the politician-bureaucracy combine is less driven by moral exhortations than by public pressure. Therefore there is a great onus on the academic community and the nation’s educated middle class in particular to intensify pressure on the political establishment to extend coverage of the provenly beneficial free mid-day meal to all government schools across the country. The national interest plainly demands it.
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A couple of changes have indeed taken place since this report was published, and I can name two off the top of my head. One, the governments have made progress in getting the parents involved in the preparation of the meals. This ensures that teachers do their real job of teaching and not spend too much time on managing the preparations. Parents ensure that quality is maintained, because they have a very strong incentive, unlike our politicians; Their own child is in there.
While the report says that the per capita cost for the scheme comes out to Rs. 1, which was true and was maintained till recently, when the government at the center decided to raise the level of investment to Rs. 1.50 per child. This will ensure that children not only get the staples like rice, dal and wheat, but now they can also get vegetables and fruits in their diets.
Also, the scheme is now much more decentralized than before. But as they say, the incentives for politicians to have an educated citizenary are low. And how right they are. This has been my view ever since I started taking any interest in Indian politics. Politicians would rather sit in their offices and do nothing while stealing state money, than actually providing good governance to their voters.
Although initially launched in 1995, the government revised it in 2004. Here are some points from the website of the Ministry of Education's Department of Elementary Education and Literacy.
Guidelines of revised National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education, 2004
“The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing - … that children are given opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity and that childhood and youth are protected against exploitation and against moral and material abandonment.
Article 39 (f)
National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (Mid-Day Meal Scheme), 1995
1.2.1 Introduction
National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education [commonly known as the Mid-Day Meal Scheme] was launched as a Centrally-sponsored Scheme on 15th August, 1995. Its objective was to boost “universalisation of primary education by increasing enrolment, retention and attendance and simultaneously impacting on nutrition of students in primary classes”. It was implemented in 2408 blocks in the first year, and covered the whole country in a phased manner by 1997-98. The programme originally covered children of primary stage (Classes I to V) in government, local body & government-aided schools, and was extended in October, 2002, to cover children studying in Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) and Alternative & Innovative Education (AIE) Centres also.
Central assistance has been provided to States under the programme by way of:-
i) Free supply of foodgrains from the nearest godown of Food Corporation of India (FCI) @ 100 gm. of wheat/rice per student per day [cost of which is reimbursed to FCI by the Govt. of India], and
ii) Subsidy for transport of foodgrains from nearest FCI Depot to the Primary School – subject to a maximum of Rs.50 per Quintal [ceiling last fixed in June, 1997].
Programme Management
- Prescription of State/UT-specific Norms of Expenditure
-- Nodal Department in the State Government/UT Administration
--- Nodal Responsibility at the District Level
---- Management at the Local Level
At the local level, State Governments will be expected to assign responsibility for implementation and supervision of the programme to an appropriate body e.g. Gram Panchayat, Municipality, Village Education Committee, Parent Teacher Association or School Management-cum-Development Committee. Responsibility for cooking would as far as possible be assigned to local women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs), Youth Clubs affiliated to Nehru Yuvak Kendras (NYKs), VEC, SMDC, PTA/MTA, or good NGOs where available.
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And then it starts spreading.
Mid-day meal scheme a success story in Rajasthan
Centre raises mid-day meal aid
Mid-day meals: MCD to involve students’ mothers
This century is ours, inshallah.
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