Tussle over buying mid-day meal ration on

Nikhila Pant Dhawan

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, May 27

It seems that the tussle over preparation and serving of mid-day meal to students under the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyaan is far from over.

After losing out on doing the work for 47 government schools located within the municipal limit to a private firm, self-help groups are now irked with school teachers for not allowing them to buy ration and other condiments for preparing the food.

Members of the federation on Sunday met Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal and submitted a memorandum of their demands.

Elaborating on their woes, Kulwant Kaur, secretary of the Self-Help Groups Federation, said, “When the mid-day meal was started under the SSA in 2005, the original draft made it clear that the food will be prepared by NGOs or self-help groups. The scheme worked well till 2008 when the students of upper primary classes were also brought under the scheme.”

“As the work increased in magnitude, staff of various government schools directed us to only cook and serve the food to the students and leave the task of buying raw material to the school authorities. The money is released to the district education officers who then further transfer it into the bank accounts of headmasters of the schools. It is then up to the headmasters to decided how to use these funds,” Kulwant said.

The government releases Rs 4.13 per student per day under the MDM scheme, apart from releasing salaries of the cooks, which is meagre Rs 1,700 per month, she added.

“We are now left with only 150 schools for which we buy ration as well as cook the food. Under the SAD-BJP government, the work of preparing and providing the food to schools located within the municipal limits was handed over to private firms, much against our demands. In the absence of any kind of check, the school authorities are minting money in the name of buying ration themselves,” she said.