Mid Day Meal scheme

On the lines of Amartya Sen’s exposition that gender discrimination in China, South Asia, West Asia and North Africa has resulted in 100 million missing women, Swaminathan Aiyer’s blog post discussed about how delayed economic reforms in our country had caused the death of 14.5 million children. The point is not really about using a more sophisticated model to estimate the “correct” number of infant deaths about bringing to the fore the magnitude of the tragedy.

And what a tragedy it is that India boasts of the largest childcare programmes in the world, the Integrated Child Development Services and the Mid Day Meal schemes being two of the country’s flagship programmes. ICDS, launched in 1975, provides early childcare to children in the age group 0-6 years while MDM focuses on improving nutritional levels of school going children aged 6-10 years. The latter was launched in 1995 and extended to the entire country by 1998. Till 2006-7 the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the principal authority overseeing the schemes implementation, had neither clarity on the objectives of the scheme nor outcome indicators and had revised objectives twice in the current decade. According to a CAG report in 2007, the Ministry maintained no data on the impact of the scheme on the nutritional status of children benefiting from the scheme or its impact on enrolment, attendance and retention of children in primary schools.

The MDM programme supports the goal of universalisation of elementary education (UEE) by providing a cooked meal to children in primary levels (levels 1-5). It aims to do this by boosting enrolment, attendance and retention. It also aims to improve the nutritional status of these children. However, an audit of the scheme revealed that the focus was primarily on providing one cooked meal with no links to the education, nutrition and health objectives. A steady increase in total enrolment of children in primary classes has been disclosed for the period 2002 to 2009. Data on retention and attendance is not available for all states for all years and so it is difficult to calculate a national average. While both demonstrate fluctuations over the period of the scheme, there is no evidence to demonstrate that this can be attributed to the MDM scheme.

The Ministry has not defined the impact parameters for measuring nutritional status. The 2004 revised guidelines specify height and weight of children in primary schools but it was not till 2007 that the Ministry of Family and Health Welfare was requested to monitor this; however no action was taken on it to ascertain improvement and impact. Despite the focus of the programme on improving nutritional status of primary school children, no or little effort has gone to establishing links with the National Rural Health Mission and ensuring the provision of micronutrient supplements. The programme guidelines emphasise focus on children from disadvantaged groups. However, the guidelines fail to define the socio-economic categories composite in special focus groups.

Aiyer attributes the poor economic growth and social injustice to India having followed Soviet Russia’s centralised model of planning. I wonder how one can safely establish the causal relationship and conclude that India would have done better without centralised planning. However, it is evident that the world’s largest lunch programme for primary school children, incidentally launched a decade after the economic reforms were initiated has achieved little, if anything at all, but that’s because it was planned poorly and implemented even worse with little thought for regional economic, social and political disparities and realities. So while it is easy to slip in to rhetoric that socialism, and communism, is bad, it may be more fitting to review our policymaking process without the constraints of ideology.