India's School Lunch Is Also an Attendance Policy — Epoche B1
In government primary schools across India, a hot cooked lunch is served to every child on every school day. The scheme, long known as the Mid-Day Meal and since renamed, feeds children on the order of a hundred million strong — the figures vary by source and by year — and it exists because of a court order as much as a nutrition plan. The order came in 2001, when the Supreme Court, hearing a case about the right to food, directed state governments to provide cooked meals rather than dry grain handed out to take home. The distinction mattered. Grain given to a family may feed the family; a meal eaten at a desk feeds the child, and it requires the child to be at the desk. That is the second purpose, and it is the one that makes the plate a policy. For a household that needs a child's hands, school has a cost. A meal lowers that cost, and the effect shows in enrolment and attendance, most of all among girls and among the youngest classes. Researchers who have examined the data find the participation effect, not only the nutrition one. The kitchens are also where the scheme is weakest. Audits keep finding thin food, missing eggs, poor storage and untrained cooks, and in 2013 more than twenty children in Bihar died after eating a meal contaminated with pesticide. Nobody who defends the scheme should pass over that. A programme reaching this many children fails at this scale too. Still, the argument for the plate is not sentimental. It is that a hungry child cannot learn and an absent child cannot be taught, and that one lunch answers both. That is why the kitchen belongs to the school, and why what is served there is an education question. References Supreme Court of India (2001). People's Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India and Others, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 196 of 2001, interim order of 28 November 2001. New Delhi. Dreze, J., & Goyal, A. (2003). Future of mid-day meals. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(44), 4673-4683. Afridi, F. (2011). The impact of school meals on school participation: evidence from rural India. Journal of Development Studies, 47(11), 1636-1656.