Portal to manage mid-day meal scheme launched

Vikas Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, December 17

After remaining in slumber despite directions from the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry for effective vigilance and monitoring of the poorly implemented mid-day meal scheme, the state School Education Department has finally rolled out the Automated Reporting and Management System (ARMS) portal.

The portal is a joint initiative of the Department of School Education and Literacy, Government of India, Department of Elementary Education, Government of Himachal Pradesh and the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Himachal Pradesh.

The initiative has been taken by the state government after the Central ministry had expressed concern over the lack of data in different aspects like total enrolment of students under the scheme in government schools, number of children being served the meal, number of schools lacking kitchen-cum-stores and cook-cum-helpers, unavailability of utensils, etc. However, the major thrust will be on collection of data regarding serving of meals to children.

Under the new system, the data collected by the Education Department will be put on the national portal. The principals, headmasters and teachers in charge at the school level can send the data on a daily basis regarding the number of children being served the meal in schools.

For this purpose, there will be a nodal officer as a state master at the divisional level, district master at district level and block master at zonal level to manage the affairs.

The block masters will identify the schools which have not sent data through SMS and will take necessary action if the school has not served meals to the students and report to the district master immediately.