Wednesday 11 June 2014

Mid-Day Meals and Beyond

Mid-Day Meals and Beyond

Siddheshwar Shukla’s article “Mid-Day Meal: Nutrition on Paper, Poor Food on the Plate” (EPW, 15 February 2014) was insightful. It highlights some pressing concerns through facts and f­igures on an issue which deals with the physical well-being of children. Nutritious food to schoolchildren is an internationally-identified dimension of quality in education.
It is now established that the mid-day meal scheme has played an important role in increasing enrolment at the elementary level of schooling, which is now almost 97% at all-India level according to the 2013 Annual Status of Education Report. But the question remains, is mere filling of classrooms with children enough? The answer too remains, a big “No”. Despite making strides in enrolment, education quality, especially in government schools, is slipping.
Though the concept of “quality” itself is vague and contested, there are some dimensions of quality in education which are generally agreed upon globally and one of them, identified by UNESCO, is nutritious food, something which the mid-day meal scheme provides in a context where malnutrition and hunger remain widespread.
Shukla deserves appreciation for his contribution which highlights the low quality of mid-day meals, low protein contents and bureaucratic disregard of the issue. When one transcends the maze of quantitative figures it is possible to see and say more. I am reminded of Krishna Kumar’s remark in his 2005 paper for the EFA Global Monitoring Report that “looking at observable parameters of quality exacerbate the problem that the discourse of quality is trying to solve”. There are certain issues and concerns which remain hidden and which cannot be understood only by mathematical, economic and other quantitative models.
While these models help us in some aspects, what really works is inspection of the mid-day meal scheme on the ground. Experience shows that where government agencies are regularly inspected the supply and quality of mid-day meals is far superior to where there is no such inspection. Further, the burden of this scheme has to be shifted from the shoulders of teachers. Teachers get involved in arranging the food and fuel and teaching suffers, often very badly. Not only this, it gives teachers a formal excuse to be irregular, late and absent from teaching.
Fayaz Ahmad Bhat
Jamia Millia Islamia,
NEW DELHI
http://www.epw.in/letters/mid-day-meals-and-beyond.html?ip_login_no_cache=a310572ffeedb88755b6e16dcf67a85d

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