People's Democracy

Mid-Day Meal Scheme, Nutrition and Corporate Capital

Archana Prasad

THE media attention on the mid-day meal scheme of the government of India in the wake of the death of 27 children in a Bihar school has focused on the local level implementation failures and corruption within the scheme. The Bihar government itself has tried to shift blame to the negligence of the local workers and the political links of the school principal who had a stake in the supply of food materials from her husband’s shop. While this explanation may be partly true, it ignores the larger systemic problems with the mid-day meal scheme. Many of these problems have arisen out of the tardy implementation and insufficient allocation of funds and the faults in the very design of the scheme. These have repeatedly been pointed out by all sections of the democratic movement and also by several orders of the Supreme Court which have tried to improve the system. But instead of restructuring the scheme and addressing the problems of the workers working in it, the central and state governments seem to be using these problems to disinvest in the scheme and push for its privatisation. Many state governments have already entered into contracts with corporate institutions and non-government organisations to absolve themselves from the responsibility of addressing these problems. Hence it becomes necessary to once again re-emphasise the need to struggle for changes needed within the scheme so that its public character and accountability can be maintained. 

ABYSMAL

STATE

The mid-day meal school scheme was first developed in 1995 and meant to be universalised to all elementary schools by an order of the Supreme Court in 2002. In 2006, it was also extended to the upper primary level. The dual purpose of this flagship programme has been to ensure that all children are retained in school and that the problem of malnutrition is also tackled through this supplementary nutrition. Under this scheme the schools are mandated to provide hot cooked and nutritious food and every school should have a kitchen shed and devices for this purpose. Today this predominantly central government scheme is meant to cater to an estimated 106.8 million children daily in 1.21 million schools across the country. At present 75 percent of the scheme is funded by the central government whereas 25 percent of the funds are provided by the state government. As of April 2012, the revised cooking cost provided per child per meal is Rs 3.11 per child (Rs 2.33 is contributed by central and Rs 0.78 by state government) at the primary level and Rs 4.65 (Rs 3.49 is contributed by central and Rs 1.19 by state government) at the upper primary level. This is clearly insufficient to provide nutritional food to children of any age, as the specified nutritional food is supposed to consist of cereals, vegetables, pulses, oil and fat and other spices. Of these, only the cereals are supplied at nominal rates by the Food Corporation of India. The rest are to be purchased from the market by the staff of the school. In addition to this, every school is meant to be allocated Rs 5000 per school; provisions are made for funding the construction of separate kitchen sheds and purchasing kitchen devices and utensils. This fund is being either underutilised or diverted to corporate non-government organisations which have entered into contracts to provide these meals through centralised kitchens.

Several surveys have found that in most states except Tamilnadu, more than two thirds of the schools do not have kitchens, toilets or drinking water facilities. This was found with respect to 61 percent of the MCD schools in Delhi where three organisations Ekta Shakti Foundation, Iskcon Food Relief Foundation and Jay Gee Humanitarian Society are in charge of providing mid-day meals. It must be pointed out that Ekta Shakti Foundation is a society setup by AFP Private Limited (a fast-food company),Jay Gee is the arm of Jay Gee Hospitality, a firm which specialises in catering in all types of foods and Iskon has tied up with the real estate giant EMMAR to build centralised kitchens. Similarly with regard to Uttar Pradesh, the auditor’s report concluded in 2008, that more than one third of the schools did not have kitchen sheds and 169 out of the 253 sheds randomly visited by the CAG were non-functional. It is surprising that instead of investing in improving the infrastructure for providing hot nutritious food, the UP government preferred to give out contracts to Akshaya Patra and Great Value Foods (owned by Ponty Chaddha). In Bihar about 80,000 schools have no sheds or toilet facilities. In this sense, the argument for centralised kitchens has become a conduit for neglecting the infrastructural maintenance and expansion of the school itself and for disinvesting in rather than strengthening a skeletal school nutrition programme. It has also become a way of subsidising the work of corporate set-up and funded NGOs and expanding the market base of some of the food processing and real estate corporate giants.

CORPORATE

PENETRATION

In this context, it is important to note that the promotion of centralised kitchens and contracts to big private players has become the cornerstone of the implementation of supplementary nutrition and mid-day meal schemes. In official parlance, it has taken the form of public-private partnerships. One of the main feature of this corporatisation is that all big corporate NGOs have industrial partners who provide them part funding and meet their infrastructural costs as a part of their corporate social responsibility. A good example of this is Vedanta in Odisha that has tied up with the Naandi Foundation (whose chairman is Ananda Mahindra) to provide mid-day meals to children in Lanjigarh, an area where they are plundering mineral resources and are locked in a conflict with local tribal organisations. While the government of Odisha pays the cost of the noon meal, Vedanta sets up the high tech centralised kitchens. But this partnership is not limited to Odisha and extends to other mineral rich states where Vedanta has stakes namely Rajasthan and Korba district of Chhattisgarh. Hence social welfare is becoming a method of not only getting financial benefits but also gaining legitimacy for the penury that is caused by the main activities of such companies.

Another interesting and telling example is that the influx of big private capital into nutritional schemes has also created monopolistic trends in the production of take home rations and mid-day meals. As the Seventh Report of the Supreme Court appointed Commissioners (November 2012) showed, four companies were supplying take home rations to more than four states. The Akshay Patra and Iskcon Food Relief Fund run the world’s largest network of centralised kitchen’s in more than 10 states of the country. The Naandi and Ekta Shakti Foundation operate and control largescale supplies of cooked mid-day meals in at least four states and propose to be expanding to others. In this way, the NGOs are attempting to assist food processing and micronutrient companies to secure the potential food market. Its adverse impact on worker’s rights, employment security of scheme workers and school infrastructure has begun to show in different states.

MID-DAY MEAL

WORKERS

The neglect and devaluation of the work of the mid-day meal scheme worker has got accentuated through the public-private partnership model analysed above. The scheme provides Rs 1000 monthly honorarium for a cook cum helper in every school. The cook cum helper is not only meant to ensure that hot hygienic and balanced diet is prepared for children. The government argues that this work is a supplementary work and does not require more than 2-3 hours a day. In this sense providing nutritious and good food and maintaining hygienic conditions in the school kitchen is not considered either a skilled or a full time job by the government. Therefore the cooks and helpers are not recognised as ‘workers’ and have no rights. Rather their jobs are largely dependent on the largesse of the school principal who employs them.

At present there are about 27 lakh mid-day meal scheme workers who work in these programmes, largely women who belong to the socially deprived groups and backward classes. These women work 5 to 6 hours a day and are also made to perform menial tasks that are not part of their job. As A R Sindhu, the convenor of the All India Coordination Committee of Mid-day Meal Workers explains, most women do not get their whole wages and are paid Rs 100-600 per month. Even this payment is intermittent and in almost all states, the workers have not got their salaries for 7-8 months at a time. Only in Tamilnadu was the payment regular. Given this status of payment and work, an evaluation report of the Planning Commission found that since the wages paid to the mid-day meal scheme workers are so low as 40-50 paise per child, there is a shortage of cooks in schools. The average number of cooks per school in the country is 0.40. But instead of increasing, this ratio is likely to decrease as more and more centralised kitchens come into operation.

Experience has shown that the involvement of local communities and families is essential in order to ensure proper implementation and positive impact on the health of the children. Realising this, the Supreme Court directed state governments to implement all nutritional programmes through local self help groups and women’s groups in 2004. But this has hardly been implemented by any state and rather, has been flouted by most states as shown in the Supreme Court appointed Commissioners Seventh Report of November 2012. That the Court was intuitively correct in its direction has been shown by the experience of states like Kerala where the panchayat implements the programme and the parent teacher bodies monitor the quality of the food. The coverage of the programme is close to 95 percent. In many schools it has been demonstrated how localised kitchens run by women’s groups are effective in running schemes like the mid-day meal programme and the ICDS programme. In each of these cases, the success of the scheme has depended on the training and empowerment of the worker who are mostly women. These models give the way forward and show that decentralised models can only succeed if there is a political will and system to delegate power and responsibility to school level parent monitored committees, neighbourhood level committees and local self governments. This should be accompanied by social audits and regular monitoring involving women’s groups, trade unions and other democratic groups.

These examples demonstrate that ignoring the mid-day meal worker will only lead to the further corporatisation and decimation of the school nutrition programme. Hence the struggle for the scheme workers rights is linked with and central to the need to press for publicly supported decentralised alternatives in implementation of nutrition schemes. These two facets of struggle need to be intensified and combined in order to fight corporatisation of publicly funded nutrition programmes.