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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

A better morning

-The Indian Express

 

Roughly three decades after Tamil Nadu devised the mid-day meal scheme for schoolchildren, the Jayalalithaa government is working on extending it to breakfast as well. Like neighbouring Puducherry, the state will ensure that schoolchildren are provided a healthy start to the day. Some private and corporation schools have already experimented with the idea.

Tamil Nadu’s welfare schemes have been remarkably efficient because of political determination, imaginative policy-making and implementation, and strong grassroots organisations. Its interventions in food security have been singularly successful, thanks to close monitoring, quality safeguards and community cooperation. It is the only state with universal PDS, after early efforts at targeting were abandoned, and has minimal leakages at the fair-price shop level. The ICDS programme is also recorded to work better than in other states, as nutritional outcomes have steadily improved. Tamil Nadu, under M.G. Ramachandran, pioneered the mid-day meal, and then it was expanded and taken up as a national intervention in 1995. In 2001, the Supreme Court directed all state governments to introduce mid-day meals in primary schools, though there are still clear regional differences in the way they are implemented.

Whether at mid-day or at breakfast, providing a balanced meal at schools enfolds several social objectives — increasing enrolment and keeping children in school, social mixing between castes, employment for women as cooks and organisers and, most importantly, easing chronic hunger and malnutrition. To sit together and share a meal is one of the best ways to break the invisible cordons that separate communities in India. The mid-day meal has been directed towards the ends of social equity, for instance, by employing Dalit cooks, or by giving women the responsibility of managing the meal, logistics and accounts. Many children come to school on an empty stomach, and these schemes offer the assurance of at least one substantial meal for all students. Breakfast is the meal that can make the critical difference. The Jayalalithaa government deserves credit for stepping up its commitment to this idea.