The
reaction has been predictable breast-beating about the inefficiency of
India’s government services (particularly in rural areas), the country’s
woeful standards of hygiene, and inattentive implementation of even
flagship national schemes by the country’s 28 state governments. The
midday meal scheme itself has been trashed in India and abroad as
wasteful and counter-productive. “Free school meals kill Indian
children,” one headline screamed. Another commentator even went so far as to claim that there is “little evidence to suggest that schoolchildren are actually getting any nutritional value from it at all.”
Critics
of the scheme view it as symptomatic of big government run amok and ask
why it is necessary for any government to feed schoolchildren. The
answer, in India, is that no one else could. While various small
school-lunch programs existed, the idea of a massive government-backed
scheme originated three decades ago in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
When
Tamil Nadu’s chief minister at the time, the film star M.G.
Ramachandran, introduced free school meals statewide, the measure was
widely criticized as populist and fiscally irresponsible. Children, his
detractors argued, go to school to learn, not to eat. But if children do
not get enough to eat, they cannot learn: empty stomachs make it
difficult to fill minds.
Tamil
Nadu’s voters, who supported the scheme at election time, silenced the
critics. So did the scheme’s results – improved literacy rates and
nutrition levels. Soon, other states were imitating the program, and in
1995, India’s central government followed suit, supplementing state
governments’ budgets so that children throughout the country could enjoy
the same benefit. Today, 87% of government schools implement the
scheme.
The
midday meal scheme – which costs India’s government about $2 billion a
year, with additional funding coming from state governments – feeds 120
million schoolchildren in more than a million primary schools across the
country. By providing free and balanced nutrition to schoolchildren, it
has provided a powerful incentive to poor families to send their kids
to school and, equally important, to keep them there throughout the day.
Indeed,
thanks to the scheme, school-attendance rates have improved, sometimes
by as much as 10%, and dropout rates have declined. And obliging
children of different castes to eat the same meal at the same time in
the same place has broken down social barriers in a highly stratified
society.
Children
whose families could not afford to feed them properly have benefited
significantly. In drought-affected areas, the midday meal scheme has
allowed children who otherwise would have starved to overcome
malnourishment. Allegations that the scheme lacks nutritional value have
been disproved. One scholar, Farzana Afridi, reported in the Journal of Development Economics
that the program “improved nutritional intakes by reducing the daily
protein deficiency of a primary school student by 100%, the calorie
deficiency by almost 30%, and the daily iron deficiency by nearly 10%.”
But,
while the midday meal scheme’s benefits have ensured its popularity,
the quality of its implementation has varied across states. The national
government provides funds for cooks and helpers, and has devised
guidelines for the program’s implementation, but schools are under the
jurisdiction of state governments, some of which are more capable than
others of maintaining the standards required to provide a reliable
service. Many northern states, such as Bihar, have lagged in providing
kitchens, storage facilities, and utensils. The rule requiring at least
two adults to taste meals before they are served to children has often
been ignored, as it was in the Chhapra tragedy.
Attempts
to enforce the rule have met unexpected resistance from teachers, who
are obliged to rotate tasting duty: they object that they are at school
to teach students, not to taste food. Some teachers’ unions have refused
to perform the task.
Sadder
still has been the reaction of some parents in Bihar, who have
withdrawn their children from school rather than risk their being
poisoned. Such concerns are understandable but manifestly exaggerated.
The Chhapra tragedy has at least focused attention on a scheme that
public opinion has largely taken for granted. But it would be a great
pity if, in examining what went wrong, deficiencies in the program’s
implementation were to obscure its accomplishments.
The
midday meal scheme has transformed lives and helped educate a
generation of poor schoolchildren. It should be emulated by other
developing countries, not shunned because of a preventable disaster.
Indeed, the Chhapra tragedy would be compounded were it to end up
derailing a program that is benefiting millions of children and their
families every day.
