What ails mid-day meal scheme’s implementation

In June, the Kerala High Court put a temporary stay on a controversial order passed by the Lakshadweep administration banning chicken and meat from the mid-day meal scheme.

While passing the order, the Division Bench asked the government why it was upsetting the food habits of the region.

Lakshadweep, a Union Territory (UT), is among the few states or UTS that offer meat and chicken to its school-going students as part of the mid-day meal programme. The number of states providing meat in the diet has fallen. An analysis of annual work plans and budget reports from the states for 2015-16 and 2020-21 shows that while five states offered meat/chicken/fish in their mid-day meal scheme in 2015-16, the number has now reduced to three. (Tripura offers chicken sometimes, whenever local social workers provide it.) Jammu and Kashmir has stopped offering meat products, and so has Nagaland.

Of all the states/uts, Lakshadweep remains the only one that offers a meat/chicken/fish diet four times a week to its school-going children.

But provisioning issues are not limited to just meat and chicken. Although the National Institute of Nutrition has recommended eggs as part of the mid-day meal diet, less than half the states and UTS have implemented the scheme.

According to the 2020-21 data, of the 36 states and UTS, only 15 offered eggs to students; in 2015-16, 16 states provided eggs to students under the mid-day meal programme. Arunachal Pradesh and Dadar and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and

Diu have since stopped giving eggs, whereas Bihar has been providing them to its students once a week.

There are wide variations among the states in the provisioning of eggs. Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh serve eggs five days a week; in Odisha, Puducherry, and a few other states, they are served twice a week; and in Bihar once a week.

The count will increase next year as Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, and West Bengal plan to serve eggs in some districts.

However, milk and fruit are rarer commodities. Even though demands have been made to include milk in mid-day schemes, analysis shows that only 11 states till now have made provisions to serve milk — higher than the eight in 2015-16. Only six states made provisions to serve fruit in 2020-21, and the count has declined from 2015-16, when 12 states were serving fruit.

Success

One of the goals of the mid-day meal scheme was to increase enrolment. Some areas like Jammu and Kashmir still use eggs and other items as incentives to drive enrolment in schools.

While the mid-day meal has helped contribute to this goal, the exact extent cannot be determined because nutrition has remained a contentious issue.

Patchy implementation and using the meal as a substitute rather than a supplement to regular diet have meant that children get less than desired nutrition. A recent study published in Nature Communications showed that the prevalence of stunting was significantly lower in areas that implemented the mid-day meal scheme in 2005. Women who received mid-day meal benefits in school were less likely to have stunted children.

Provisioning of milk, eggs, and fruit can only help improve these statistics. The data from NFHS-5 (National Family Health Survey-5) for children under the age of five shows that stunting and wasting increased in 12 states, and 15 states witnessed an increase in underweight children as compared to the NFHS-4 survey.

Anaemia among children increased in 18 states, and Lakshadweep witnessed the highest decrease of 10.5 per cent.

A piece of more representative data, albeit a bit older (2016-18), from the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey, shows that while stunting in school-going children (aged 5-9) was lower than in adolescents, its incidence increased as we moved from the age group 5-9 to 10-19. Over a quarter of the country’s kids were stunted in the 10-19 age group.

Further analysis shows that in 2016-18, states that had an egg component in their mid-day meal programmes had higher egg consumption than states that did not.