NEW DELHI, India— India’s Mid Day Meal Scheme is one of the largest food assistance programs in the world with a 2013-2014 budget of Rs 30 billion ($490 million.) It is managed by the Ministry of Education, which claims the program is in place to “enhance enrollment, retention and attendance and simultaneously improve nutritional levels among children.”
Any government program of this size—with the goal of assisting 120 million children every day—no doubt suffers from organizational problems.
Referencing a study done by Yamini Aiyar for the Accountability Initiative, The Guardian states that “too many layers of government were involved in the scheme, resulting in poor information, coordination and monitoring.”
A few examples of poor monitoring and coordination show the issues this scheme encounters. A little over one year ago in July, 2013, 23 children from the Indian state of Bihar died as a result of unsafe food preparation. Outrage within the community led to protests as well as a government probe into the incident.
Death due to improper food preparation is luckily an extreme, but more often children fall ill. The most recent incident, reported by the Times of India, happened earlier this month when 50 students became sick at a government run school in Bihar. The cause was found to be a dead lizard in their food.
This follows 12 students in the Buxar district becoming sick, 33 students in Vaishali and 25 students in Siwan, all during the month of July.
Other issues range from delayed payments, poor food quality, snakes and worms in the food, cooks not receiving pay and food not being delivered or being wasted. There is even embezzlement of the money by way of fake enrollments.
It is also a difficult challenge to deliver food to rural areas. Roads are not paved and the infrastructure is lacking. Even if food makes it to these remote areas, kitchens to cook the food in are not available within the schools.
A few NGOs have solicited local women’s groups to do the cooking with some success.
An interview with The Guardian showed that a school in the rural village of Karulihai in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh hasn’t received a food delivery since November 2013.
Mr. Sonpal, the schools only teacher, said that the meal is often the children’s only food for the day. Many have stopped coming in to school.
There is some attempt to deal with the issues. This past July the government of the Indian state Bangalore approved a state review mission to assess nutrition and many complaints related to distribution of the food.
All the aforementioned problems are not meant to support the dissolution of the meal scheme, as it has in fact helped many Indian children.
Research from the nonprofit Akshaya Patra, which works with the government to implement the program, states that the meal scheme has led to “increased enrollment in schools, increased attendance in schools, improved performance of students in class in terms of better attention span and academic progress, [and]improved nutritional status of students.”
Another study by Farzana Afridi of Syracuse University and the Delhi School of Economics claimed that the program has “reduced the daily protein deficiency of a primary-school student by 100 percent, the calorie deficiency by almost 30 percent and the daily iron deficiency by nearly 10 percent.”
The meal scheme is generally a successful one, but that should not blind policy makers from potentially dangerous problems that have arisen in this large-scale meal program or let its success blind them from the serious issue of malnutrition in India.
Recent data released by UNICEF and the Global Health Database shows that by 2015 around 33 percent of Indian children will be malnourished. India currently has more malnourished children than sub-saharan Africa and half of all child deaths are a result of malnutrition.
Hopefully nonprofits and the government can work together to improve and perfect the Mid Day Meal Scheme, as India’s children definitely need it and can benefit from its proper implementation.
– Eleni Lentz-Marino
Sources: Akshaya Patra, Accountability Initiative, dnaindia, The Economist, The Guardian 1, The Guardian 2, India Spend, Mid Day Meal Scheme, The New Indian Express, Reuters, The Time of India
Photo: NPR Media