-India Today A Chhapra like tragedy is waiting to happen in the capital. Delhi has made a mess of its Mid-day Meal Scheme: only 50 of the 280 samples taken in 2012-13 from centralised kitchens run by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to provide midday meals in government schools in the capital met prescribed standards. In other words, more than 80 per cent of the food cooked for primary school students from Class 1 through...

-The Indian Express Bihar horror must focus attention on why this powerful scheme is so patchily implemented across India Even as news broke of children succumbing to the toxins in their school midday meal in Chhapra district, Bihar, political parties snatched it for their own ends. The facts of the case have been barely comprehended, parents and teachers are in shock, but the BJP was quick to blame the Nitish Kumar government...

-NDTV New Delhi: The mid-day meal scheme, the world's largest such scheme, was started with an aim to provide safe and nutritious meal to India's school children so that they grow up strong and bright. But instead, what our future generation is being fed is grain crawling with worms, flies and even lizards. A hot cooked nutritious meal was also thought to have been a selling point to persuade poor families to...

Just when the country is getting ready to expand the Right to Food for all, the recent deaths of school children in two districts of Bihar (Chhapra and Madhubani) have raised many uncomfortable question about our standards of cleanliness, sanitation and hygiene in and around the kitchens being run under the Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDMS). These, and many more anomalies, have been brought out by a recent report titled...

-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...