View of IMPACT OF MID DAY MEAL PROGRAMME AMONG STUDENTS

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ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING

Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal IMPACT FACTOR: 2.104 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) UGC APPROVED NO. 48767, (ISSN NO. 2456-1037)

Vol. 03, Issue 02,February 2018 Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE

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IMPACT OF MID DAY MEAL PROGRAMME AMONG STUDENTS Manjusha Rai

Assistant Professor, Home Science

Government Girls College, Robertsganj, Sonebhadra, UP, India 1 INTRODUCTION

India is the largest functioning democracy in the world with the second largest population. On 7.4% of the world’s land area supports 16% of its population. The population is increasing by about 16 million every year. After Independence, the constituent assembly, a 26^th day of November 1949, in its preamble of the constitution envisaged to ensure social, economic and physical stability to the citizens. Moreover the first Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru in his speech in the dependence day, said-.

“The service of India means the service of The Millions who suffer.” It means the ending of poverty, ignorance disease and inequality of opportunity.

Tyrannically, even after fifty years of independence and forty-eight years of birth of the Indian constitutions, the preamble of the constitution in terms of distributing dream justice and economic equality have remained a distant dream.

A majority of children and women are raised in families living in extreme condition of poverty. Poverty leads to malnutrition. Malnutrition is the most wide spread condition affecting the health of children, scarcity of suitable foods, lack of purchasing power of family as well as traditional believes and taboos about what the baby should eat, often lead to an insufficient diet, resulting in malnutrition (K Park 2005). Malnutrition not merely gives rise to morbidity and mortality and prevents a child from developing into a fully functional adult; it adversely affects Universalization of Elementary Education (UEE) in the following ways:

 Malnourished children are less likely to attend school regularly.

 Even if such children do attend the school, they find it difficult to concentrate on and participate in teaching, learning activities well enough. They therefore tend to dropout interalia, because of the inability to cope.

 Even if the children do not actually dropout, their attainment levels tend to be low.

2 MID DAY MEAL PROGRAMME

Mid Day Meal Programme is in operation in the district since July, 1995. Cooked meal at lunch hour is being provided to the students enrolled in class I- V. Poverty is a major issue for implementation of the Mid Day Meal Programme. It has its impact on primary education as well.

Because of mass illiteracy and endemic poverty, the community participation in primary education is low. High dropout, low retention, problems of girls education and education of ST (tribal) children are the major issues for the administration.

Several steps have been taken in the district to improve the scenario (geocities.com).

National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (commonly known as the Mid Day Meal Scheme) was launched as centrally sponsored scheme on 15th August 1995. Its objective was to boost “Universalization of Primary Education by increasing enrollment, retention, attendance and simultaneously impacting on nutrition of students in primary classes (class I-V)”. It was implemented in 2408 blocks in the first year and covered the whole country in a phased manner by 1997-98. The programme originally covered children of primary stage (class I-V) in government, local body and government’s aids school and was extended in October 2002, to cover the children studying in Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) and Alternative and Innovative Education (AIE) centers also. Initially a large number of states continued to face financial difficulties in meeting cooking cost and providing cooked meal to their students, and accordingly distributed only food grains @ 3 kg per students per month. Even nine years after the commencement of the NP- NSPE, 1995, serving of cooked meal could not be universalized and the quality of the meal served to children was not

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2 satisfactory. Keeping these aspects, in view, changes in the scheme had become necessary.

In June- July 2004, certain policy pronouncement were made in regard to the Mid Day Meal Scheme and this was revised by central government entitled with, “National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education, 2004 (NPNSPE, 2004)” whose main objectives are as follows:

 To boost Universalization of primary education (class I- V) by improving enrollment, attendance, retention and learning leaves of children, especially those belonging to disadvantaged sections.

 Improve nutritional status of students of primary stage.

 Provide nutritional support to students of primary stage in drought- affected areas during summer vacation also.

The Mid Day Meal Programme is not only of most significance for its nutrition and teaching- learning method for school going children but the programme is also helpful in broadening the mental horizon of community regarding modern welfare and development services for the betterment of their life. The Mid Day Meal Programme is supposed to act a changing agent in the community show that it’s believes and faiths can be changed and they should be induced to take an effective part in main developmental programme in improving their own socioeconomic condition by remaining their culture hindrances and superstitions.

3 ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE PROGRAMME

The government of India provides free rice, while the state governments provides funds to meet other expenditure like cost of dal, oil, salt, fuel and stationary, vegetables and condiments (geocities.com). According to the programme the Government of India will provide grains free of cost of other ingredients, salaries and infrastructure.

Since most State governments were unwilling to commit budgetary resources they just passed on the grains from Government of India to the parents.

This system was called provision of “dry ration”.

On November 28, 2001 the Supreme Court of India gave a famous direction that made it mandatory for the state governments to provide cooked meals instead of “dry ration”. The direction was to be implemented from June 2002, but was violated by most States. But with sustained pressure from the right to Food Campaign (righttofoodindia.org) more and mor states started providing cooked meals.

In May 2004 a new coalition government was formed in the center, which promised provision of cooked meals fully funded by center. This promise in its common minimum Programme was fallowed by enhanced financial support to the state for cooking and building sufficient infrastructure. Given this additional support the scheme has expanded its reach to cover most children in primary schools in India. In 2005 it is expected to cover 130 million children.

(En.wikipedia.org).

4 IMPACT OF MID DAY MEAL PROGRAMME

Mid Day Meal Programme has been one of the earliest supplementary nutrition programmes in the country. The programme has nutritional as well as educational objectives. It was initiated in 1963 as a part of applied Nutrition Programme in the State of Karnataka for school children with the assistance of the Co- operative for American Relief Everywhere (CARE) (Mid Day Meal Programme in Karnataka, 1990) as an incentive program for two lakh beneficiaries. The coverage gradually increased to more than a million in the state by 1980-81. Under the program each beneficiaries is expected to receive a supplement providing 330 calories and 7 to 12 grams of protein (EGM-SFP, 1983).

Education plays a vital role in the development of human potential. The State Government are spending considerable portion of their limited resources to provide educational facilities all over the country. In spite of these efforts the goal of cent percent Universalization of elementary education appears to be far and elusive due to inherent socio –economic factors present in the society. Most of the children from

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3 low socio – economic society suffers from under nutrition (NNMB Report, 1992;

Child Atlas UNICEF, 1981); more often they drop out from schools at an early age (Rameshwar Sharma et al; 1994), which directly affects their personality development. Several programs have been launched to combat these problems.

The number of children (6-11 years) who were eligible for school enrolment was estimated at the rate of 14 percent of total population of the particular village. (Census of India; 1991).

The National Evaluation of School Nutrition Programs (NE-SNP) in USA showed that the School Lunch Programs exceed most reasonable expectation for its nutritional effectiveness. (Radzikowski et al; 1984). The anthropometric analysis in the (NE-SNP), suggested that long term participation in the School Lunch Program had no relationship to height but a marginal impact with respect to weight of the beneficiaries. (Vermeersch et al;

1984). The Mid Day Meal Program in the state of Karnataka in fact seems to have achieved educational rather than nutritional benefits as evidenced by lower drop out rate and higher retention rates as compared to the data of United Nations International Children Fund (UNICEF, 1981) and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT, 1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. K Park. Prevention and Social Medicine, 18th Ed. 2005; 385: 406.

2. http://www.geocities.com/bororissa/mdm.

html.

3. http://righttofoodindia.org/

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mid-daymeal- scheme.

5. Mid Day Meal Programme in Karnataka, Department of Public Instruction, Government of Karnataka, 1990.

6. Expert Group Meeting on Supplementary Feeding Programme (including Mid Day Meal Programme). Proceeding of the Nutrition Society of India. No. 29, National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, 1983.

7. National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau Report, National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, 1992.

8. Child Atlas of India United Nation Children Fund (UNICEF), New Delhi, 1981.

9. Rameshwar Sharma KV, Hanumantha Rao D, Vishnuvardhana Rao M, Mallikarjuna Rao K, Gal Reddy Ch, Sharad Kumar, et al. Mid Day Meal Programme: Report on 6 state Evaluation. National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, 1994.

10. Census of India, 1991. Final Population Totals, Controller of Publications, 1993.

11. Radzikowski J, Gale S. The National Evaluation School Nutrition Programme:

Conclusion. Am J Clin Nutr, 1984; 40: 454- 461.

12. Vermeersch J, Hanes S and Gale S. The National Evaluation of School Nutrition Programmes: Programme Impact on Anthropometric Measures. Am J Clin Nutr, 1984; 40: 414- 424.

13. Fourth All India Education Survey. National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi, 1978. 14.

http:/education.nic.in/mdm/mdm2004.as p 14. William NS. The Evaluation of Nutritional

Status. In: Nutrition in Clinical Care eds.

Howard RB, Herbold NH. Mc Graw Hill Book Company, New York 1978; 290- 303.