Authors: Adreeta Chakraborty, Asawari Luthra, Nidhi Waldia, Saumya Malhotra and Vani Bhatnagar (IUIF 2020)
With so much disparity in the types of schools in India, the general notion projects Government schools with low quality. Thus, people tend to incline towards sending their children to private schools. However, not everyone can afford the luxury of private school education. According to a report by UNDP and OPHI’s global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) of 2018, every second person belonging to the Scheduled Tribes, 50 percent of all tribal population, 33 percent of Dalits, and 33 percent of Muslims of India are economically marginalized. The children of these families attend public schools. Moreover, there is a critical and reciprocal nature between health and education, especially for children. Poor health and nutrition amongst children, due to low-incomes in the family, can prove to be a barrier to attendance and educational attainment/achievement. Childhood disability, chronic illness, and extreme malnutrition are a direct impediment to their participation in school. Further, inadequate nutrition manifests in short-term hunger syndrome, which impacts a child’s ability to learn and retain new concepts.
Since the inception in 1995, Mid-Day Meals (MDMs) have played a significant role in mitigating the issue of malnutrition by aiming to serve freshly cooked meals to 120 million children of India.
The MDMs, thus, have emerged as the most critical site for inclusion and exclusion amongst children going to government schools. The conception of the MDM Scheme revolved around two central ideas. First, addressing malnutrition and, in turn, the increase in enrolment and attendance in schools. Second, to foster equality over the concept of a shared meal. A study conducted by the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS) in 2014 revealed that 20 percent of the respondents enrolled their children in school because of the MDM, while another 20 per cent said that the scheme was instrumental in motivating their children to attend school regularly.
While 15 percent of the respondents said that the academic performance of their children had improved due to the introduction of the MDM, approximately another 15 percent of respondents said that the health of their children had improved after consuming the nourishing food being provided under the MDM. Also, the MDM had helped in reducing the total expenses incurred by them on food. However, the efficacy of MDMs varies across states and is diverse for children from different socio-economic backgrounds.
For instance, upon questioning various Teach for India (TFI) teachers and fellows, we discovered that in metropolitan and urban settings, central kitchens have been responsible for transporting hot cooked meals to clusters of schools. Their infrastructural adequacies have helped in maintaining hygiene. Furthermore, open communication between school authorities has accounted for easy management. Well-connected circuits of roads allow for effective and cheap transportation. In these areas, the scheme has not been a central reason for the increase in attendance. The meals provided are only supplementary to those provided by parents, as was aimed to be when the policy was initially drafted.
Nevertheless, eating habits in India have been inextricably rooted in caste for centuries. Food is significantly implicated in the oppression that Brahmanism sustains. Therefore, MDMs cannot be independent of its stringent imagination of purity and pollution, and sacrality and sacrilege. The system ordains that the Brahmin must maintain the inherent virtue of his caste by eating food that is strictly vegetarian. If he were to touch or eat meat, he would lose his caste, and meat is thus a source of pollution, understood as carcasses that would fatally besmirch the holy and pristine palate of the “high-born”. The imagination of purity and pollution serves as the ideological backbone of caste. It also perceives the menstruating woman as a pollutant of spaces, especially of the temple and the kitchen. The culture of a school strongly reinstates these rituals—caste and its concentric circle of prejudices cause a routine disruption in the execution of the MDMs. It distorts the idea behind the policy into an ugly instrument of reinforcing hierarchy and exclusion, constituting a brazen violation of the Right to Education Act.
These ideas continue to exercise their pernicious influence upon modern Indian policy implementation. In Pithoragarh, Uttarakhand, Nira, a school principal is a Brahmin woman, who takes great pride in the fact that the Bhojan Mata (the one who cooks the midday meals for all the children) is a Joshi, i.e., a fellow Brahmin. Were this cook (who is paid anunimaginably meagre salary of 2000 rupees per month) someone from a lower caste, Nira would not allow them to cook on the premises. Nira’s sense of superiority is visible frequently in thethe way she treats her pupils, most of whom are Dalits. If the students bring food from home and offer her a bite, she categorically refuses to taste anything that has come from Dalit homes and kitchens. The administration, thus, harnesses the power inequality between them and the children to the emotional and educational detriment of the students.
A six-state qualitative study of 2012 reported that in all states, children from better-off families (Regardless of caste/community) do not eat the MDM and go home for lunch. Moreover, children sit in groups of their communities of caste, religion, and gender. The IIDS study shows that in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh, Dalit children are served less food, as compared to upper-caste children. Children belonging to the lower castes in many such schools are asked to bring their plates or are served after all the upper caste children have finished eating. Some are also denied access to water taps that are used by children belonging to the upper-castes.
Another factor that discourages SC children from participating in MDMs is the location of the schools. The children often face harassment while passing through the high caste localities, which prevents them from attending school. Around 55 per cent of the primary schools in the areas surveyed by the IIDS are located in a neutral place. However, about 23 per cent of the primary schools are located in localities inhabited by the upper castes, and only 13 per cent are located in SC localities. Even the question of who cooks the food is riddled with community-based discriminations. In the study done by the IIDS, only around 20 per cent of the cooks employed were from the SC community, while 24 per cent were STs, 5 per cent were Muslims, and more than 51 per cent are from the higher castes. To a general question about the reason for not employing SCs as cooks, 76 per cent of the respondents mentioned caste as a reason. In comparison, 12 per cent reported the notion of untouchability as another reason, and 10 per cent cited the refusal by high-caste children to eat food cooked by SC cooks.
The unavailability of kitchen sheds in rural government schools has been an enormous problem. As a result, classrooms are used for storage or cooking, or the food is cooked in open areas, both being hazardous options. There is also a huge gap between policy and practice. Community support from gram panchayats and village education committees are given crucial managerial responsibilities such as ensuring efficient cooking, serving and cleaning, sensitizing children towards their peers, and personal hygiene. Due to marginalization and lack of credibility in these structures, the responsibility often comes down on the teacher. This not only takes away from the focus on academics but also centralizes a lot of power in the hand of a single (often biased) entity.
If the MDM scheme wasn’t already wrought with enough problems, it just got worse with the COVID-19 crisis. In March 2020, with school closure and A 21-day lockdown, the scheme is both exacerbating existing issues and introducing new challenges. To ensure that children do not go hungry, Union Minister of Human Resource Development —Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank — asked all states and union territories to continue providing MDM to children. To get food to MDM beneficiaries, they proposed three possibilities: to deliver packaged meals to the beneficiary’s doorstep, to provide them monthly ration kits, or to provide them with the money conversions, also known as Food Security Allowances. Mr Pokhriyal also announced an increase in funding from 7300 crores to 8100 crores to account for the new costs of transporting mid-day meals, the cost for cooking, and for the increasing prices of food grain.
The Centre and states share the cost of the MDM scheme. However, its implementation depends upon the individual setup of each state. Save The Children Foundation’s assessment across 15 states found that around 40 per cent of the eligible children have not received the MDMs during this lockdown. Several states like Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana were unable to take the initiative till July as the Centre had not released sufficient funds. While other states like Maharashtra and Bihar failed to implement the delivery of the MDM altogether. In Bihar, as a consequence of the stalling of MDM, the Musahars — one of the most marginalized Dalit communities — have taken to waste collection or begging for food.
Further, In Urban areas like Delhi, where the lockdown restrictions have been stricter than in rural areas, the administration has laggard in keeping track of beneficiaries, especially for the children of migrant workers. They have also neglected to provide and monitor the food of beneficiaries in containment zones and hotspots. People have also questioned the efficacy of dry rations as a substitute for cooked meals as the preparation cost per beneficiary is very low, when cooked on a large scale. Thus, a very small amount gets transferred to the accounts, which translates to very little in terms of nutrition. Unavailability of a freshly cooked nutritious meal will severely affect a child’s physical, emotional and psychological development in the long run.
The shutting down of schools due to COVID -19 is affecting not only children but the entire infrastructure of food security in India. Food stocks are accumulating as farmers lose their assured MDM market. Bhojan Matas, who already have had a precarious position, have lost their job and income stream altogether. And additional stressors prompted by the pandemic, such as the loss of employment, has implied that atop the existing 690 million undernourished people, 132 million are being pushed into chronic hunger. As a result, in states like Rajasthan, several families have withdrawn admission of their children from private schools. They are now being admitted into government schools so as to ensure food security for their children. The COVID crisis has scourged the most vulnerable causing an immense setback for achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal Two — zero hunger by 2030.
Image Credit: ILO for Asia and Pacific
