Joey writes, “It’s about time for another blog post.”
Easy, easy!
So the answer to the title of this post:
The Mid-Day meal.
The history of mid-day meals in government schools is well-documented. Country-wide nutrition surveys as early as 1980-81 revealed that food deficiency seriously impacted learning outcomes among low-income Indians. Starting July 1, 1982, Tamil Nadu began a “Mid-Day Meal” program, which fed children ages 2-9 in schools in rural areas. In 1982, the program extended to urban areas. Starting in 1984, the scheme extended to urban areas, too.
After Tamil Nadu began seeing growth in student attendance, literacy rates, and test scores, other states began adopting the mid-day meal schemes—mostly the states with larger resources in the South (including Andhra Pradesh). Tamil Nadu is one of the most literate states in India, with a rate of 73.5%, and studies cite the mid-day meal as one of the major causal boosts for that program. In 1995, citing supporting statistics showing the invaluable contributions of the mid-day meal to educational outcomes, especially in Tamil Nadu, the state of greatest implementation, the central government of India announced the “National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education.” All government schools in India, under this program, were given support to deliver cooked meals to children. In the next five years, however, the transition was still not made. In 2001, the Indian Supreme Court, citing the effectiveness of the mid-day meal, directed government schools to provide mid-day meals to the very poor across the state.
Though implementation has been shoddy and imperfect, the staggering results of the mid-day meal are hard to contest. Since its introduction, mid-day meal has boosted school attendance as much as 50 per cent in rural areas and as much as 19 per cent in urban areas. Girls, especially, are more likely to attend school when there is a mid-day meal. As one report notes, “Parents are not generally opposed to female education, but they are reluctant to pay for it. School meals could make a big difference here, reducing the private cost of schooling.”
The average increase in school enrollment across India has been a steady two per cent per year over the past thirty years, but in states after the introduction of a mid-day meal for the poor, there is a striking and sudden increase. One of the major reasons of student absenteeism, cite school operators, are finances. Many students simply disappear if the parents cannot afford to pay the monthly tuition bill.
Many Indian children, particularly those who attend budget schools and government schools, arrive to school on an empty stomach. In the budget schools that I have visited, the school has a lunch break where children go home for lunch, but the principals at the schools I visited admitted that many to most of their students do not get food at lunchtime. Surveys on the effect of mid-day meals in the classroom showed, according to teacher testimony, fewer children falling asleep in class, better attention, and higher classroom control.
Of course, mid-day meals have their problems. Government schools receive inadequate funding for the program, and often corruption and mismanagement do not deliver the mid-day meal funding directly to the schools. Moreover, schools have inadequate facilities—one government school that I visited had a classroom as a kitchen, and a teacher boiling water to cook rice in her off-period. But current NGOs on-the-ground are delivering quality mid-day meals to students, especially in Andhra Pradesh, and it is worth exploring to figure out how to deliver this crucial element of school competitiveness and student performance to budget schools.
The Naandi Foundation, with which we have a relationship, has started a unique public-private partnership to deliver mid-day meals to government schools. Naandi runs sixteen mid-day meal kitchens across India, including one in Hyderabad that serves 964 schools and 106,000 schoolchildren a day. Though Naandi’s involvement is limited to government schools, it is worth exploring through Naandi and foundations like it the prospects for meal delivery to students in budget schools. As we have established, children in budget schools often come from the same socieconomic background in government schools, yet no similar systematic mid-day meal program within budget schools. One way that we could meet a potential need, as well as strengthen the budget school sector, is to explore with Naandi and other potential partners the potential of a mid-day meal for budget schools.
One potential option for action with the mid-day meal program is to work with Naandi or other partners to start a small-scale meal delivery operation to budget schools that fit within the legal limits of the for-profit/non-profit divide of this venture, and to follow Naandi’s model in its own kitchens of starting small and pushing the meal program in a scalable way to encompass potentially interested budget schools.
ERB
