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Midday meals in Telangana need a closer supervision
News trickling in from various cities of Telangana State doesn’t bode well for the state run midday meal scheme. Most updates on midday meals revolve around serving rotten eggs, inferior quality pulses, no vegetables, replacing eggs with bananas and inflating the number of meals being served.
News trickling in from various cities of Telangana State doesn’t bode well for the state run midday meal scheme. Midday meals being served to students in schools across the state include rotten eggs, inferior quality pulses and no vegetables.
Upon speaking with people in the know it was revealed that the State government had mandated supplying 2 eggs per week to students, but the contracting agencies of the midday meal programme were selective in choosing the eggs from market in a way that would be profitable to them.
It came to light that the agencies select rotten or smaller eggs from the supplying poultry farms. A similar plan was being followed while buying dal. Alongside, it has been reported that the agencies were presenting inflated number of midday meals being served.
The midday meal programme has proved to be a big failure in the Nalgonda district. As per government records, only 24 % of the total students are benefiting from the program as most of the students don’t come to school considering the soaring temperatures.
Karimnagar sports an equally dismal summer attendance figure of 20% of the students according to the District Educational Office (DEO) records. Strangely, the midday meal program has started being implemented during the summer holidays and is planned to continue till the schools reopen. Meanwhile, the agency serving midday meals at Savaran street government high school is serving a banana instead of an egg as mentioned in the menu.
A similar situation is being played out in Adilabad where the implementing agencies are not providing mid day meal as per the state government's proposal. Speaking about the change in the menu, in-charge teacher S Chandrasekhar said, “We are not providing eggs to students considering the heatwave.”
It was discovered that the agencies were presenting an inflated number of midday meals being served in Khammam while the actual number of students attending schools was miniscule.
District president of Students Federation of India (SFI) T Naga Raju said that most schools in the district had on an average 5-10% attendance but the agencies were presenting an inflated numbers by showing the name of all the students for mid day meal.
Meanwhile a probe has been ordered the incident in Mahbubnagar where students were served chilli powder during a midday meal, including issuing a show cause notice to the Mandal Education Officer