A day before on my departure to US, I had the good fortune to visit "Mohsin Shariff Education & Charitable Trust Mid-Day Meals Programme" operations located in K R Puram. This trust every day prepares and delivers the 'Mid-Day Meals" for the government schools students in and around Bengaluru. Everyday food is prepared and delivered to 50000 kids in Government schools. Bear in mind that, these meals are served free of cost to everyday. Aided schools are also included in this program.
Even though the government claims that it is responsible for providing the mid-day meals to all the primary school children in government schools, but the work of this trust lays bare all the truth about the claim of government.
MSEC trust bears the cost for everything thing - ingredients, preparations, delivery except for the rice that it receives from government. But we all can imagine the quality of rice that it receives, as it is in most instances worst than the PDS quality. In order to clean and prepare the rice fit for consumption, MSEC Chairman Mr. Mohsin Shariff has a special unit to clean the rice and polish it.
Here are some startling statistics:
- One exclusive unit of rice cleaning
- One exclusive Unit for Food preparation
- Total staff numbering 150
- Total of 7 quintals of food is prepared
- 50000 children are served
- Operates 20 Vans for the distribution
- Meals preparation start @ 4 PM daily
- Ready by 6 AM and delivered by 8 AM daily.
Apart from Mid-Day meals for school children, meals are provided daily for 10,000 Senior Citizens also.
MSEC Chairman, Mr. Mohsin Shariff and his staff lead by its administrator Mr. Jamal Mohammed deserves compliments for their noble work and efforts.
P.S. Majority of the children who are benefited in this program come from so impoverished conditions that, this is the only meals they have in the day. Many also take some food home to share it with their siblings. Really our country INDIA is the country of contradictions. It not only hosts wealthiest but also the poorest among the world.
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This is not about Charity!
Prajagale,
This post is not about charity or praising the good work done here. There are many such organizations who are involved in the provisioning of mid-day meals to the poor children in govt primary schools. ISKCON is one such organization who is doing a wonderfull work in this area.
The post is to highlight the hidden corruption and depriving the entitlement these poor souls who have been promised on govt policies and budgets.
This is about corruption, where we tend to ignore or turn away to even acknowledge it as an issue. Even the media turns a blind eye to these perpetual corrupt practices. Even the investigative journalist fails to even give a chance even after providing the required information and material to proceed further.
I would like get some traction here to see the quantum of money involved here for mid-day meals program and how it can be deliver better. Not neccessarily just only looking at an example of corruption.
-Syed
Only Rs 1.30 per child per one meal for the MMS?
Courtesy - Indiatogether.org
"...Karnataka
The Karnataka government began its mid-day meals scheme in June 2002. Initially, the programme was limited to seven backward districts of the state - Raichur, Koppala, Gulbarga, Bidar, Bellary, Bagalakote and Bijapur. Later, in 2003 under the ambitious "Akshara Dasoha" programme, the remaining 20 districts were also included in the scheme. By the year 2005-06 the programme covered close to five lakh government schools and nearly seven lakh government-aided schools in the state. The government had budgeted Re.1 per child per meal initially; this was raised to Rs.1.31 per student per day subsequently. This is the lowest amount spent per child among the southern states. Each child gets 100 grams of rice per day from the FCI under this scheme. ..."
600-900 crores are spent every year!
According to GOK's own report on Mid-Day Meal Scheme, Karnataka alone spent about 587 crores in 2010-11 and budgeted 893 crores for 2011-12.
Silver lining here is per most impact studies done on Mid-day meals implementation, it is the Karnataka implementation stands out as best managed program. Even touted as the best practices in managing this program.
One of the reasons cited for such success is teh involvement of community at delivery level including the role played by NGOs. There are about 106 different NGOs who are participating in this program covering 5876 school with 7.7 lakh students. That is almost 16% of the targeted population.
In another impact study done by Rajshrii Jayaraman and her team from ISID, overall impact of this scheme pan India seems to be on positive side. This Scheme where ever has been implemented right, has achieved Two major objectives - reduced starvation deaths among children and shown improvement in school enrollment and attendance.
The report starts with these lines "....Using a panel data set of over 500,000 schools observed annually from 2002 to 2004, we find that midday meals result in substantial increases in primary school enrollment, driven by early primary school responses to the program..."