The world's largest food program

Action against mid-day meal provider in India New Delhi - Arabstoday India runs the world's largest school feeding programme - "Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS)" reaching out to nearly 140 million children in over 1.3 million schools, across the country everyday. The food is prepared in about 600 thousand community-kitchens by more than 2.5 millions cooks and helpers, mostly women. The Scheme's sole objective is to attract the children of the poorest of the poor families to schools, make them literate, and raise the overall educational and nutritional levels of the average Indian youth. Started in 1995, the Scheme has come a long way. There has been a marked improvement in enrollment of poor students in schools, their retention, and nutritional levels, particularly in the rural and remote areas. The most important achievement has been the rise in education level of the girl child, as compared to two decades ago when girls in remote areas/ villages were just confined to the four-walls of their homes and forced to perform household chores like cooking food, cleaning clothes and utensils. Elaborating this vast achievement, Dr Amarjeet Singh, the senior most official in-charge of the Scheme, told KUNA "One of the major achievements of the Scheme has been educating the girl child. The male-female gap in the literacy rate has been narrowed. Between 1961 and 1991 there was hardly any progress in reducing this gap, but there has been a steep fall after 2001. Presently it stands at below 17 percent, and we aim to bring it down to below 10 percent by 2015." According to Dr Singh, another great achievement of the Scheme has been the promotion of social equality in Indian society. "Traditionally, the people belonging to lower and backward castes were looked down upon and even considered untouchables. But, this Scheme has taken up the task of getting the MDMS food cooked by women belonging to the lower/ backward castes. And, interestingly, now there is no bias and students from every caste enjoy eating food cooked by these women," he said. It has been noticed that MDMS has helped in preventing classroom hunger, promoting school participation, fostering social equality and enhancing gender equity, thereby facilitating overall healthy growth of children, said Dr Singh. He further stated "The lunch offered in every school today acts as an 'incentive' for the children coming from poor families. Notably, 37 percent of India's population continues to be poor to the extent of not able to arrange two square meals a day, out of which 25 percent can't manage even a single meal a day. The idea of getting good food drives such children to schools. And, once they reach school, education also becomes a part of their daily life. " Meanwhile, proper care is taken to maintain the nutritional value of the food being served to the school students. "One meal provides 450 calories to a student of up to Standard Five, and 700 calories to a student up to Standard Eight," Dr Singh told KUNA. The MDMS continues to remain one of the pet projects of the Centre Government, and this could be judged from the fact that a sum of USD 2.4 billions has been allocated for the MDMS in the Union Budget for 2012-13, which is a hike of around 15 percent vis-@-vis last year. Presently, the Scheme is meant for school students up to Standard Eight, "but the Government is seriously thinking of expanding it to the students of Ninth and Tenth standards as well, keeping in mind the young female students' needs of high nutrition intake at this age," said Dr Amarjeet Singh.