Anoushka Gupta, India

India’s School Feeding Programme: Implications for Distribution and Social Equity

By Anoushka Gupta, India

“[The] persistence of hunger in many countries in the contemporary world is related not merely to a general lack of affluence, but also to substantial —often extreme—inequalities within the society” (Drèze and Sen, 1991, p.2)

Introduction

While 21st century India has advanced along many parameters, hunger, and malnutrition, particularly among children, continues to cast a blot on her “development” trajectory. In 2021, India’s position in the Global Hunger Index dropped 29,1 percentage points since 2000. Moreover, there was a decline in key child nutritional indicators according to the Government’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data comparing 2014-15 to 2019-20 (Seth and Jain, 2021).

Indicator NFHS-4 (2014-15) NFHS-5 (2019-20)

Children under 5 years with severe wasting (weight-for-height) (%) 7,5 7,7

Children aged 6-59 months who are anaemic (%) 58,6 67,1

Table 1: Key Child Nutritional Indicators. Source: Seth and Jain, 2021.

Successive Indian governments have attempted to respond to these alarming figures through formal policy measures. The National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013 granted citizens legal entitlements to safeguard their right to food and brought existing schemes such as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), Public Distribution System (PDS) under its ambit. “One of the guiding principles [of NFSA] is its life-cycle approach” (Department of Food and Public Distribution, n.d.) whereby food provisioning for children is allocated through ICDS and MDMS, while PDS targets eligible households through provision of subsidised food grains. Hence, unlike PDS which takes a clear ‘targeted’ approach based on predefined income thresholds, the programmes for children were envisioned as ‘universal’ policies, and without any attached conditionalities. This essay seeks to map out the components of the MDMS with specific focus on Rajasthan state in North-Western India. The period of analysis will be restricted to the launch of the scheme up to 2020, before COVID-19 induced school closures pushed children into greater food insecurity. In the second section, the essay examines the extent to which social inequalities have been transformed in MDMS through an engagement with concepts such as social reproduction, rights-based discourse, and age-based classification of the scheme.

Section I: Key features of MDMS

“Covering an estimated 120 million schoolchildren by 2006 (Khera, 2006), [MDMS] now is the largest school feeding program[me] in the world” (Singh et al., 2014, p. 275).

First launched in 1995, the scheme has evolved significantly since its inception. The changes include extending the scheme originally from children in primary school i.e. Standards 1 to 5 up-to upperprimary school i.e. Standards 6 to 8, and replacing provision of dry rations to one hot cooked meal per day (for a minimum of 200 days in a school year) as per nutritional standards specified by the Central government. In addition to the stated objectives of MDMS as “enhancing enrollment, retention and attendance and simultaneously improving nutritional levels among children,” (Ministry of Education [MoE], no date), Jean Drèze (2003) makes the case for the potential of MDMS to contribute to enhancing social equity. Specifically, he argues,

“[m]id-day meals help to undermine caste prejudices, by teaching children to sit together and share a common meal. They also foster gender equity, by reducing the gender gap in school participation, providing an important source of female employment in rural areas, and liberating working women from the burden of having to feed children at home during the day” (Drèze, 2003, p. 4673).

Section II will delve deeper into some of these aspects under social equity. In terms of eligibility, the meal is provided free of cost to “all children studying in Government, Local Body and Government-aided primary and upper primary schools, Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS)/Alternate Inclusive Education centres, including Madarsas and Maqtabs” (MoE, n.d.) in Standards 1-8. In Rajasthan, this translated to 60% of all children in the age group 6-141 enrolled in government schools and 0,4% of children in the same age group in Madarsas and EGS’ in 2018 (Annual Status of Education Report [ASER], 2018).

Figure 1. Four States Received Their Entire Approved Budget for MDMS in 2018-2019. Source: Pandey and Kapur, 2020.

Funding for MDMS is shared in a 60-40 ratio between Central and State governments respectively. 2 Specifically, costs of payments to MDMS cooks, cooking, infrastructure is split between the two. The central government, however, supplies “grain (wheat or rice) …to the state governments free of charge” (Khera, 2006, p. 4743). Calculations are drawn up on a per child, per day basis. “As per revised cooking cost per child, per school day (with effect from 1 April 2018) the minimum allocation for primary schools was Rs. 4.35 ($0,05) …[and] for upper primary schools…was fixed at Rs. 6.51 ($0,08) per child, per day. This was further revised to Rs. 4.48 ($0.06)

1 The Right to Education Act, 2009 guarantees free and compulsory education to children aged 6-14. MoE documents stipulate that a child is expected to be age 6 in Standard 1 and age 14 in Standard 8 2 This applies to all states barring the 7 North-East Indian states where the ratio is 90-10 between the Centre and State

for primary schools and Rs. 6.71 ($0,09) for upper primary schools with effect from 1 April 2019” (Pandey and Kapur, 2020, p. 6). It is important to draw a distinction between budgetary allocation, on one hand, and states receiving the stipulated amounts from the Centre and proceeding to utilise the funds, on the other. For example, while 81% of the allocated amount for MDMS was disbursed by the Centre to Rajasthan in 2018-19, the state had the highest budget utilisation at 110% compared to all other states in the same year. Further, there are instances of states, including Rajasthan, going beyond their budgetary allocation and paying additional sums from state funds towards implementing MDMS (Pandey and Kapur, 2020). In terms of sources of provisioning, the State (both Central and State governments) plays a critical role in financing the scheme and ensuring last-mile service delivery of grain to schools. In addition to elected representatives and members of the bureaucracy who take care of financial and logistical functions, a key functionary of the state within MDMS is the teacher hired in government schools. Eventually, they are the final point on the supply side to physically oversee food distribution and exert a degree of subjectivity owing to this important function. The local community environment is critical to MDMS in three important ways. First, cooks, usually women, hail from the area where the school is located. Second, in many states, additional food ingredients are sourced locally, and the meal is customised to dominant local eating norms. During fieldwork conducted by the author in Madhya Pradesh in 2019, the menu for the week was painted on a board outside the school (see image below). Here, the menu was entirely vegetarian, and roti (flatbread) and dal (Lentil soup) were cooked every day, in addition to some variation in the type of vegetables served. Caste and vegetarianism play a critical role in determining the menu in a particular area and food served varies as a result. For example, “Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Orissa, West Bengal and Jharkhand provide eggs to school students” (Prasanna, 2021).

Figure 2. School Lunch Menu in Bhopal District, Madhya Pradesh. Source: Gupta, 2021.

Third, though the family is not captured in the formal outline of the policy, the role of parents and household members in mediating access to the MDMS with reference to caste has proven to be a major challenge, particularly in states like Rajasthan where caste hierarchies are extremely stringent. The third source of provisioning in MDMS has increasingly come from civil society organisations in some states. Given that implementation is left to the state government, many have

chosen to outsource cooking and distributing meals to specific organisations. In Rajasthan for example, Akshaya Patra, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), provided hot cooked meals to 4.428 schools and 231.187 children in a given year (Akshaya Patra, 2017). According to their website, the NGO performs the same function in 11 other states in India. Finally, the market, through utilisation of Corporate Social Responsibility funds by large corporate companies, has also contributed towards MDMS. Havells India, best known for manufacturing fans, allocated Rs. 1,77 crore ($215.215,88) for a project through which hot cooked meals were provided to children in Alwar district in Rajasthan. The company website states that the project was piloted in 2005 and “started with serving just 1,500 children across 5 schools. [It] grew to serving over 60.000 students across 693 schools daily in the district” (Havells India, 2019).

Section II: Analysis

The analytical section focuses on the dimension of social equity within the MDMS through an engagement with the concepts of (a) social reproduction of gender and caste; (b) a rights-based approach embedded in the scheme and its link with distribution, and finally, (c) whether the age and grade-based classification of the scheme is attuned to realities of Indian classrooms. (a) Social reproduction is defined by Mackintosh as “the process by which all the main relations in the society are constantly recreated and perpetuated” (1981, quoted in Elson, 2012, p. 63). Given that the school, as a public institution, is embedded in a specific environment and entails daily social interactions between peers and teachers, it reproduces hierarchies that already exist in that social context. Owing to the innate link between “purity,” caste, food, and given that MDMS entails preparing food and distributing it, several stories of discrimination have emerged in the years since the scheme was launched. For instance, in a study by Indian Institute of Dalit Studies conducted across five states including Rajasthan in 2003, “37% report[ed] caste discrimination in MDMS and 48% report[ed] opposition to Dalit cooks” (Sahai, 2014, p. 8). In a study focusing specifically on the issue of access of Dalit children to MDMS in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, Thorat and Lee (2005) made several crucial observations:

“Where the mid-day meal is served in dominant caste localities, access for Dalit children is held hostage to the fluctuating state of caste relations in the village or region…Dominant caste community members intervene to block the hiring of Dalit cooks, favouring dominant caste cooks instead. Where a Dalit cook has been hired, dominant caste parents then begin sending their children to school with lunches packed at home, or require their children to come home for lunch, in any case forbidding their children to eat food prepared by the Dalit cook” (Thorat and Lee, 2005, p. 4199). In addition to the role of caste in determining MDMS cooks, Sathiamma (2017) argues, “women welfare workers both in primary education and in primary healthcare [in India] are examples of the state’s welfare politics contributing to or perpetuating the sexual/gender division of labour” (Sathiamma, 2017, p. 39). To explain further, women taking on the role of cooks in the scheme, though renumerated, extends their domestication from private to the public sphere and reinforces gendered assumptions of women’s work. This has further led to rendering women’s work invisible and been used as an excuse by the State to underpay MDMS cooks. “In eight states and three Union Territories, [their] monthly pay remains frozen at Rs 1.000 [$13,50] since 2009, despite many Parliamentary committees over the years recommending a hike” (Barman, 2021).

(b) With the NFSA, 2013 converting benefits under legislations under its ambit (including MDMS) into legal entitlements, provisions under MDMS technically can be challenged in court in cases of non- implementation. However, Drèze (2004, p. 1726) argues,

“[While] the right to food [can be interpreted as] an entitlement to be free from hunger, which derives from the assertion that the society has enough resources, both economic and institutional, to ensure that everyone is adequately nourished, difficulties arise as soon as we try to flesh out this broad definition and translate it into specific entitlements and responsibilities. ” Given the reality of structural inequalities reproduced through the scheme, Ferguson’s (2015) critique of rights-based discourse is useful to understand why entitlements under MDMS are hard to realise. In the context of existing constitutional rights, but inadequate social and economic access, he gives an example of a man who did not want the constitutionally guaranteed “right to a house” but rather, the house itself. Further, while analysing the causes of persistent deprivation, Ferguson (2015) argues that individuals are now

“cut out of a distributive deal that used to include them. In such a view, getting cut back into the distributive deal is not treating the ‘symptom’ but goes, in fact, to the very root of the matter: the lack of any distributive entitlement is the underlying cause” (Ferguson, 2015, p. 38). Linking this argument back to MDMS, it becomes clear that the scheme reproduces structural inequalities on lines of caste and gender and does little to challenge the unequal distribution of food in India.

“One common finding encountered by researchers studying the shaping of social policy in India is that the social structure ensures that benefits of social development are distributed according to inequality of status, i.e., those who are in relatively higher status get the maximum benefit of social development” (Garg and Mandal, 2013).

Table 2. Trends Over Time Multigrade Classes 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018. Source: State Report Card: Rajasthan in Annual Status of Education Report, 2018.

As a result, while MDMS “has led to a substantial increase in the enrolment of children in primary schools” (Khera, 2006, p. 4745) and been an important safety net for children against

hunger, “there [continues to] exist a marked widening of the gap, for instance, in educational and nutritional development among various social groups” (Garg and Mandal, 2013). (c) As explained in Section I, MDMS is implemented for students in Standards 1-8 and the Central government guidelines stipulate two separate sets of caloric requirements per meal for students in primary and upper-primary classes. The latter is prescribed a higher caloric requirement. The assumption at the root of this differentiated specification is that children are assumed to be a particular age in a given class and that children at different age groups have varying nutritional requirements. For instance, it is assumed that a child in Standard 1 is age 6 and has a different and slightly lower caloric requirement from a child presumed to be age 14 in Standard 8. However, the assumptions here do not stand scrutiny to the reality of classrooms in India and the way that they are organised. To explain this further, the assumption of “monograde” classrooms i.e., that children of one age group attend a particular class has been repeatedly shown to be disrupted by classroom settings where children of multiple age groups sit together. The Table below describes the reality of multigrade classrooms in Rajasthan and shows that far from being an aberration, children of different age groups have over a period of time routinely been sitting with one or more other classes. Hence, specifying caloric requirements according to the class a child is enrolled in does not necessarily cater to their actual nutritional needs. In this context, moving away from the age and category-centred classification in MDMS towards a relational or person-centred approach is much more fruitful. White (2002) argues that a key implication for this shift in approach would be to acknowledge “age [as]… essentially transformative” (White, 2002, p. 1102). Further, Kazak (2009) argues that the idea of chronological age at the heart of age-based classification negates social constructions of childhood youth. Kazak’s contribution is to put forward the idea of ‘social age’ as a supplementary perspective to chronological age in response to this trend. She highlights that chronological age itself is socially constructed and that “social age can be analytically and practically distinguished from biological development in a way similar to the distinction between gender and sex” (Kazak, 2009, p. 1310). Further, using social age mainstreaming can help development actors better understand contextual challenges.

Conclusion

Shamefully, even in the 21st century, the spectre of classroom hunger haunts India. While various studies have illustrated the positive effects MDMS has had on school enrolment, attendance and nutritional indicators, the essay attempts to critically evaluate the dimension of social equity and probe the various ways in which inequalities are reproduced through the scheme. As long as structural discrimination on lines of caste, gender, and identity mediate access to food, the potential of MDMS to eradicate hunger for all children will be lost. Finally, for MDMS to truly serve as a safety net in increasingly precarious times, equitable distribution of food must be treated as an urgent priority.

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