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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Not Doing Away With Hot Meals For Children Under ICDS, Centre Clarifies -Anoo Bhuyan

Not Doing Away With Hot Meals For Children Under ICDS, Centre Clarifies -Anoo Bhuyan

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published Published on Sep 24, 2017   modified Modified on Sep 24, 2017
-TheWire.in

This comes after Maneka Gandhi recently said the government was considering moving from food transfers to cash transfers.

New Delhi: The Ministry of Women and Child Development has said there is no plan of replacing hot cooked meals, which the government currently provides to children between the ages of three and six years, by either uncooked food such as ‘nutrient packets’, ready-to-cook food or cash.

“There has been a lot of discussion on this. But there is no plan to remove hot cooked meals. It is a part of the National Food Security Act,” said women and child development ministry secretary Rakesh Srivastava. “The role of anganwadis in cooking hot meals for children and women is specified in Section 5 and 6 of the Act. The central ministry provides only guidelines to the states. But states cannot violate the Act. If they do, they can be taken to court,” he said.

This clarification follows reports that the government was in fact moving towards this. The indications on this came from comments made recently by Union minister Maneka Gandhi at a conference, as well as tenders floated in Maharashtra to replace the extensive network of freshly-cooked meals there with ready-to-cook packed food. The ministry has also been considering providing ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for children with severe acute malnutrition, which has been vetoed by the health ministry. The women and child development ministry then advised states to also backtrack on this, which led to some like Maharashtra cancelling their tenders for RUTF.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry for the provision of food, both cooked and uncooked, to infants, children and pregnant and lactating women. This is done through the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), which is a centrally-sponsored scheme.

The secretary also said, “The Act, as well as various Supreme Court orders, are very clear that self-help groups and mahila mandals are the first choice to provide food to children and women under the ICDS. Only if there is no infrastructure for this can the government consider moving towards private contractors. But the first preference is to be given to women’s groups who cook this food in the anganwadis.”

At a recent conference on undernutrition organised by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi said she wants to replace the existing policy of administering food to one that administers nutrition. For this, her suggestion was sending ‘nutrient packets’ to beneficiaries via the Indian postal service.

“Supplementary nutrition is in the form of take-home rations or hot-cooked meals. I want to bring about a complete change, an out-of-box change,” she said. “What we came up with is a change in policy which is, we stop thinking of this as giving food. Khana nahi dena (We give nutrition),” she also said. The packets would be a dry mixture of peanuts, millets and micro-nutrients which can be had with liquids like water, juice, milk or lassi.

The state of Maharashtra in July had floated tenders to provide packed food to three million children who currently are meant to be receiving cooked food. This is a Rs 575-crore business and Maharashtra invited bids for five years, in all 34 rural and tribal sectors. Besides children, this would impact about 45,000 small-scale women’s groups who currently are employed in this network.

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TheWire.in, 23 September, 2017, https://thewire.in/180587/icds-hot-meals-children-maneka-gandhi/


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