India’s faulty meal scheme and its dying schoolchildren

THE horrifying news of children dying of food poisoning after consuming toxic lunch served at a primary school in the eastern Indian province of Bihar has expectedly evoked a national furor. While the tragedy like any other one in India has already been reduced to a full-blown political slugfest, corpses were inhumed by angry parents in the school campus itself, wanting the graves to stand as a stark reminder of state apathy. Even as conspiracy theories float around, such tragic incidences should set off alarm bells in the corridor of power given the fact that the nations’ ambitious midday meal program is one of the largest free school-feeding schemes undertaken anywhere on earth, providing cooked meals to more than 120 million children in over a million schools across the length and breadth of India. This novel project has in fact been the mainstay of India’s effort to achieve 100 percent school enrollment rate. Moreover, in a country where nearly half of its children remain undernourished and cannot afford the luxury of going to school because education is pitted against livelihood in the underprivileged households, this program is the most potent tool to tackle the dual scourge of hunger and illiteracy simultaneously. But when the Indian state finds itself in a peculiar position of not being able to guarantee safe foods to millions of school attendees, questions will also be raised about the standards of education imparted in such schools. Can we really expect the kids to receive proper skill enhancement training through appropriately framed curriculum in an overstretched system? The gruesome story of poisoned platter is however not unique to Bihar. Unhealthy school food has caused hospitalization in many more provinces across India. Adding to the woe is the tendency to divert allotted funds meant for feeding students and supply of substandard grains which even livestock will refuse.
So, why is the midday meal scheme tottering on the brink of collapse in spite of the fact that it should have been a relatively easy administrative exercise to ensure total success? This input driven social scheme, bereft of any complex eligibility criteria, is simply based on universal transfer of food grains and money to government schools in compliance with a pre-determined population based nutritional guideline. The actual implementing power is vested in the school managements who are responsible for procuring cooking materials, hiring cooks and preparing meals for children though some of them have preferred taking the outsourcing route and allocate the requisite function to local non-governmental organizations. Unfortunately, India’s much-vaunted free school-meal program has got stuck in a capability trap. Like most other developing nations, New Delhi too launched colossal social schemes without creating the basic infrastructure required to make such programs successful on the ground. Even the routine tasks are not performed properly resulting in tragedies like the one that gripped Bihar days ago. Lack of synchronization between the nodal authorities responsible for rolling out the midday meal scheme smoothly and the district administrations — authorized to sanction funds and grains to schools, monitor progress, maintain accounting records and resolve administrative bottlenecks — has abetted mismanagement and even embezzlement. On checking of records in various districts, it has been discovered that utilization numbers in majority of cases do not provide the actual consumption in schools. Then glaring mismatch is often detected in the documentations prepared by the schools and the local administrations as their figures on expenditure rarely tally with each other. This systemic opaqueness coupled with inordinate delay in fund and grain transfer has led to school authorities formulating ad hoc strategy on their own that inevitably compromises the very principle of the midday meal scheme apart from putting accountability at risk. Confronted with such constraints, school principals are often forced to enter into credit based arrangement with local shop owners for the supply of ingredients thus making the children consume far less than the recommended quantity of food occasionally.
Spate of tragic incidences involving the midday meal scheme across the country should make the governments at the state and central level sit up and fix the ailing system on war footing. Since forensic report has confirmed the presence of poisonous pesticide in the samples of oil procured from the leftover food in the Bihar disaster site, there is no doubt at all that something drastically wrong is going on in the implementation stage. The nation’s top audit watchdog, Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has periodically warned the government about several infrastructural deficiencies. In its severe indictment of the midday meal process, the CAG has taken exception to the fact that no attention was being paid to hygiene and safety norms during the cooking process all over India. Moreover, contrary to laid down regulations, teachers were found to be involved actively in procurement of food grains and vegetables as well as cooking and serving of meals thereby contributing positively to the wastage of teaching hours. But then, instead of banishing a program whose primary vision envisaged achieving community bonding in a highly stratified society whereby children irrespective of gender, religion and caste will get the equal opportunity to study and eat together, screws needs to be tightened at all levels. Let us not forget that parents from deprived backgrounds, who often shied away from sending their wards to school, enjoyed a sense of ownership in their children’s education, thanks to this creative scheme. So, to strengthen the wholly subsidized school-feeding program and bring closure to the bereaved families, stringent punishment must be meted out to the guilty in a way that sends a clear signal to all and sundry — the consequences for apathy and neglect will be far reaching, whosoever the guilty is.

• Seema Sengupta is a Calcutta-based journalist and columnist.