Students fed up with mid-day meal scheme

Karimnagar: The State government should review the mid-day meal scheme in view of students often staging protests, saying they are not being fed nutritious food and that worms are often found in it. Blame it on the government dithering on clearing the bills in time. As such, the managers are hard put to squeeze the budgets and cut back on quality and quantity, too. Add to it, prices of essential commodities are also mounting. There are about 7,600 mid-day meal managers across the district.

Bills ranging from Rs 30,000 to Rs 1,00,000 per person have been pending. Several organisers say they are taking recourse to loans to meet the expenditure. Serving food as per menu costs Rs 15 per student. Mid-day meals administrators say that even if the cost is low to some extent, the financial burden will be more in the school with more students. Around 1,50,000 students are being served mid-day meals under while there are 2,423 schools across the district. Egg should be served with quality vegetables, greens and sambar three days a week.

Vegetable biryani is to be provided only on Saturday but the government is paying Rs 5.40 paise per student from class 1 to 5, Rs 8.17 per student from class 6 to 8 and Rs 10.67 per student from class 9 to 10 (with egg). The organisers are dependent on potato, tomato and other vegetables, which are available at low prices. In the past, it was decided to give Ragi gruel to the students in the morning. Due to lack of funds, the administrators are not implementing it. As such, the students are not getting nutritious food.

On the other hand, the DEOs of Karimnagar, Jagtial, Rajanna Sircilla and Peddapalli said that they prepare bills from time to time and send them to the treasury. At present, the bills have been sanctioned till June. However, the mid-day meal organisers say that they are not in a position to incur debts if the bills are sanctioned from time to time.

Burra Manjula, a mid-day meals manager from Mallapur village in Gangadhara mandal, told The Hans India that they have not received the salary hike for the last eight months. It is not possible to provide lunch with egg for only Rs 10.67 nor is it viable to prepare lunch with two curries. Earlier the rice supplied for mid-day meals used to be good, but now it is not like that, rice is made into a lump, she said.