Mid-Day Meal Scheme

The Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS) is considered as the world’s largest school meal programme and reaches an estimated 12 crore children across 12 lakh schools in India.
In 1925, a Mid Day Meal Programme was first introduced for disadvantaged children in Madras Municipal Corporation. At National level, the MDMS emerged out of the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP–NSPE), a centrally sponsored scheme formulated in 1995 to improve enrollment, attendance and retention by providing free food grains to government run primary schools.
In 2002, the Supreme Court directed the government to provide cooked mid day meals in all government and government aided primary schools.

MDMS guarantees one meal to all children studying in Government, Local Body and Government-aided primary and upper primary schools and the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) and Alternative and Innovative Education (AIE) centres including Madarsa and Maqtabs supported under under Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (an overarching programme of the Ministry of Human Resource Development), and National Child Labour Project schools run by the ministry of labour.
The calorific value of a mid-day meal at upper primary stage has been fixed at a minimum of 700 calories and 20 grams of protein by providing 150 grams of food grains (rice/wheat) per child/school day.
The cost of the MDMS is shared between the central and state governments. The central government provides free food grains to the states. The cost of cooking, infrastructure development, transportation of food grains and payment of honorarium to cooks and helpers is shared by the centre with the state governments.
Students up to Class VIII are guaranteed one nutritional meal at least 200 days in a year. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Puducherry have even extended the scheme to Class IX and X.
The Scheme comes under the Ministry of Education.

According to a new study on the inter-generational benefits of India’s midday meal scheme, girls who had access to the free lunches provided at government schools, had children with a higher height-to-age ratio than those who did not.
Using nationally representative data on cohorts of mothers and their children spanning 23 years, the study showed that by 2016, the prevalence of stunting was significantly lower in areas where the mid scheme was implemented in 2005.

More than one in three Indian children are stunted, or too short for their age, which reflects chronic undernutrition. The fight against stunting has often focussed on boosting nutrition for young children, but nutritionists have long argued that maternal health and well-being is the key to reduce stunting in their offspring.
Noting that “interventions to improve maternal height and education must be implemented years before those girls and young women become mothers”, the study has attempted a first-of-its-kind inter-generational analysis of the impacts of a mass feeding programme.
The linkages between midday meals and lower stunting in the next generation were stronger in lower socio-economic strata and likely work through women’s education, fertility, and use of health services.

These findings come at a time when the midday meal scheme has effectively been put on hold for the last one and a half years, as schools have been closed since March 2020. Although dry foodgrains or cash transfers have been provided to families instead, food and education advocates have warned that this would not have the same impact as hot cooked meals on the school premises, especially for girl children who face more discrimination at home and are more likely to drop out of school due to the closures.
The findings of the study exacerbate concerns that the interruptions to schooling and to the midday meal scheme could have even longer term impacts, hurting the nutritional health of the next generation as well.

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