Answer: The National Programme of Mid-Day Meals (MDM) in schools is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS) of the Ministry of Education, aimed at providing meals to students with a view to enhance enrolment, retention and attendance of children while simultaneously improving nutrition at all levels. It is the world’s largest school feeding programme, as the children covered under the MDM scheme are entitled to meals under the National Food Security Act, 2013. Apart from increasing enrolment, as per the government data, in the year 2018-2019, the MDM scheme served about 9.17 crore children in 11.35 lakh schools across the country before it was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, India has recently slipped to 101st position (out of 116 countries) in the Global Hunger Index, 2021, from its earlier position of 94th (Global Hunger Index, 2020). As per the data released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, over 33 lakh children in India are malnourished and more than half of them fall in the ‘severely malnourished’ category. These highlight the ineffectiveness of the MDM scheme. Various reasons for the ineffectiveness of the MDM scheme are:

• Poor infrastructure: The MDM scheme suffers with respect to inadequate infrastructure in terms of cooking shed, water supply, utensils etc.
• Corruption and leakages: The CAG’s performance audit report of the MDM, 2015, found financial mismanagement by the then HRD ministry, diversion of funds by states and fake enrolments.
• Social discrimination: A study by the Institute of Dalit Studies in UP, Bihar, West Bengal, e.tc, found that social discrimination was prevalent in several schools on the basis of caste while preparing and serving food to students.
• Meagre allocation of resources: Salary of cooks and helpers is too low to incentivize them for proper implementation of the scheme.
• Quality of food: There have been reports that children were fed substandard or adulterated food leading to food poisoning at times.
• Inadequate monitoring: There are provisions for regular social audit, field visits and inspections but these are seldom carried out. Further, field visit reports are not available after FY14 and monitoring institutions’ reports are not available after FY15.

Remedial measures required to make the MDM more effective include the following:

• The government needs to establish a system to ascertain that the guidelines related to stipulated nutritional requirements in the meals are followed.
• There is a need to narrow the gap between enrolments versus actual number of children availing the MDM scheme.
• Monitoring and supervision mechanisms should be implemented effectively. The state government needs to strengthen the internal controls at all levels by building proper data systems to track the scheme.
• Quality of cooked food served needs to be enhanced through periodic training of cooks-cum- helpers on aspects of hygiene and health. In this context, Self-Help Groups can be roped in to ensure quality standards.

A comprehensive, periodical and systematic orientation is pertinent to sensitize all stakeholders including policy makers, implementers, teachers, central level officials and community members to make this scheme successful.