The way Central Government floated Mid Day Meals scheme has landed in a mess. Hind sight reveals that incompetence, irresponsibility and corruption all combined to make a fiasco of a scheme that was intended to bring great relief to poor school going children. At the base of the scheme was the thinking that students coming from poor rural families are usually underfed and under-nourished. Unless young children are healthy and robust, they cannot develop strong in body and mind, which is the primary object of education in lower and middle level schools. Mid Day Meals scheme is the Centrally sponsored scheme and at the time it was introduced by the State Education Department, the expenditure on this head was shared by the Centre and the State in the ratio of 65:35. The Central Government passed on the parameters of the scheme to the State Government laying down in clear cut terms the norms of selecting the schools and students, the items of mid-day meals to be served, the sources from where the edibles would be obtained and all minute details. What the State School Education Department did was to assign the job of looking after the entire supply and distribution to a team of school teachers. Though many complaints were made intermittently by some schools or parents yet by and large the scheme was carried till December 2016. Suddenly from December 2016 funds were stopped without defining the reason except that the Centre had not released the funds.
It is a sad commentary on the performance of the Ministry of HRD to have suddenly stopped the funds forcing the schools to discontinue the Mid Day Meals scheme. Why this whimsical order or action was taken remains a mystery. It is true that at one point of time serious complaints about the quality of food and related matters were brought into public domain and DE also reflected on the subject advising the authorities to take note of the complaints and set things in order. Total suspension of the scheme forced the teachers to provide meals to the students by making contribution from their pockets till funds were released. At the same time we learn that the schools/teachers have been borrowing eatables on credit from local groceries promising them to pay the money in full once funds were released. According, to official record the total number of schools in Jammu division where the scheme was in force is 12,500. This is not a small number. According to the assessment made by the School Education authorities, the amount of arrears has accumulated to 25 crore rupees.
One cannot help expressing regrets at the incompetence and imbecility of the School Education authorities who are responsible for creating a mess and bringing defamation to the civil society. It is rather shameful that firstly the scheme was suspended all of a sudden, secondly the State Education Department did not come out with a clear cut policy of what has to be done in a situation in which funding had been stopped, thirdly why did the school authorities allow the in-charge teachers to take law into their hand and make an uncharitable show of munificence. Evidently, there is something more in the matter than what meets the eye. Where the teachers placed in charge of the scheme paid extra remuneration for this additional work? Were they deployed at this work at the cost of the students for whose teaching these teachers were employed? Did the School Education authorities at the tehsil/district level know that the in-charge teachers were continuing the scheme by paying from their pockets for the purchase of edibles like LPG, oil, vegetables, salt, masala, atta and rice etc.? There appears a total mess and the reality remains submerged under the argument that funds were stopped. May be the Union Ministry of HRD had reasons to stop. Why did not the State Education Department take proper steps to remove the bottleneck there and then and resolve the deadlock?
Though, the Education Minister has assured that the problem will be solved shortly, and we hope he means to do that but the crucial question is why did he not think of ordering a departmental inquiry into the episode to fix the responsibility. It is important to disclose the loopholes and irregularities if any. Since he has decided to requisition the services of an NGO to resume the scheme, the inference is that there has been something fishy in the system that was in vogue till date. His argument that teachers should attend to teaching and not other activities is a correct approach but why was this principle forgotten or deliberately ignored all these years. The civil society would like an inquiry to be ordered to know why such a chaos disrupted a well chalked out Central scheme.
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