Serving a poison free meal to our children

The Bihar midday meal tragedy in which over 20 children died after consuming a meal laced with pesticide prepared in their school brings home many well known facts -

1. The facilities in majority of our government run schools are so poor, be it classroom itself, the playground, or the quality of teachers, that it is a crime to call it a school.
2. Providing some sub standard grain and hoping the health of the children improves is a fallacy. Borne out by the fact that even after years of the midday meal scheme, large proportions of Indian children are undernourished, underweight and stunted.
3. The communities these schools serve are so poor and disempowered that they cannot demand their rights to a nourishing, hygienically cooked meal for their children.
4. Therefore, when there are no proper utensils for cooking, or storage, or adequate rations, there is no protest from them or a demand for what is their right.
5. The persons who are enstrusted with the job of preparing the meal get no training in hygiene. India's poor are forced to live in extremely unhygenic conditions and being illiterate and uneducated, they often do not know how such conditions impact their health. In the Bihar case, the person who put the oil in the pesticide container, probably did not realise that pesticide can kill. Probably the person did not know that pesticide should be stored away from food.
And when the children protested over the taste and look of the food cooked, the principal forced them to eat saying nothing could be wrong as the oil had come from her husband's shop.


A question that bothers is why was a pesticide container kept next to the school rations in the first place?


The Bihar government is planning to paint the midday meal safety norms on the walls. Would that help? What happens if the cook is illiterate?
What would help is -

A course in basic hygiene and food storage.

Regular checks by a monitoring team, which should be the members from the community whose children study in the school, or the Village Health and
Sanitation committee or an equivalent local body in the urban areas.

Something that has been seen to work, to improve the standard of the food cooked and served is the involvement of the mothers of the school-going children, be it in procurement, storage and cooking of the rations. It has worked in many parts of Tamil Nadu and I wrote about it three years ago when I saw the state's midday meal programme.

If it can work there, it should work in other states including Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, home to many midday meal scandals. But for that the 'control' or to use a politically correct word 'management' of the scheme should be in the hands of the parents. The government's role should be of a provider and facilitator, the parents and a teacher representative would be the implementators -- lifting of the rations provided only if they meet a certain quality,  preparing and serving  of the meals. 


More on -
India's midday meal programme
WHO had asked India to ban toxin that killed children

Another heart-warming story

Another heart warming story of India's children. With just a little guidance, this is what they can achieve -

A rag picker enters the National Institute of Design and wants to design automobiles. But first he wants to design an aid that will reduce the burden of the LPG delivery man as he struggles with a cylinder over flights of stairs.

Why is it that such an aid has not been desgined before? We have had the LPG cyclinders for over 50 years now and the delivery man has been struggling since then with his heavy burden.No one thought of it before, least of all the oil companies.

I wonder why is that so? Is it because no one thinks of the hardship of the poor? Of  how life can be made just a little comfortable for them?

Read this story in The Times of India - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Destinys-design-Rag-picker-makes-it-to-NID/articleshow/20009704.cms

More than a meal

By Shree Venkatram

The future of India lies in the health of her children. The latest Human Development Report shows that 47 per cent children are underweight. Over 34 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs 40 a day. The mid-day meal (MDM) scheme is thus a necessity. It is an investment the country makes in the health of its children. But unfortunately, the government’s implementation of the scheme leaves much to be desired in most parts of the country.

Recently, some of our young MPs — keen to understand the malnutrition situation in the country — made jaunts to a few states. Meanwhile, there was a hare-brained suggestion from some quarters to replace a fresh MDM with packed food — like biscuits. Our leaders feel that by doing away with the hot meal,they would be stemming the corruption found to be associated with the programme. It is akin to killing a person because of an ailing organ. It would be funny, if it were not appalling, to see how ignorant some of our leaders are of a government scheme working well in some parts of the country. The advocates of packed meals should visit some villages in Tamil Nadu to see for themselves what a fresh, hot meal can do. The formula adopted by those schools running a successful MDM scheme leaves little room for corruption and has dramatically improved the quality of the meal.

What is this magic remedy? It is the involvement of the mothers of the children in the MDM programme. Along with the teachers, they have a say in the purchase and storage of the food items. The mothers’ group of each school selects from among themselves those who will cook and serve the meals. The cooking is done on the school premises and they ensure that each child gets a hot meal of rice, sambhar and greens or koottu (mixed vegetables). The child carries a plate to school and after eating, washes and takes it home to bring it again the next day.

The scheme is working so well that the balanced nutritious meal comes for (hold your breath) just Rs 5 a day for each child. Tamil Nadu has an MDM committee, which has drawn up a weekly menu, providing for variety and ensuring that the children get balanced nutritious meals. The involvement of the mothers in the meal programme has had many positive spin-offs. Their presence on the school premises and the constant and regular monitoring by the state authorities ensure that teachers do not absent themselves from work and classes are run on a regular basis. The INDUS project launched by the Indian government in 21 districts of the country to eliminate child labour has found that involving mothers in the MDM programme has brought the children into schools faster than any other scheme. In districts with high instances of child labour like Virudhunagar and Namakkal for example, involving the mothers has promoted teacher-parent interaction, thus benefiting the child. In some areas, NGOs have joined hands with the government in running special schools for mainstreaming child labourers. Some of them have managed to raise additional resources so that each child can be given a glass of milk or a mid-morning snack. In some of these special schools, an afternoon snack in the form of a cup of groundnuts, cooked beans or Bengal gram has been introduced providing an additional helping of much-needed protein. The mothers involved in the cooking programme are given a monthly stipend, which goes into augmenting the household income. Another big plus is that children from different religions and castes eat food cooked and served from a common pot. They sit together, breaking bread, and caste barriers. So let us hand over the reins of the MDM programme elsewhere in the country too to the mothers. They will ensure that their children get adequate nutrition and also attend school regularly. At stake is much more than a mid-day meal scheme.
The writer is a consultant with the International Labour Organisation.

The article first appeared in The Times of India

Sam Pitroda's recipe for success

By Shree Venkatram

The message was clear: “You will have to help yourself if you want to change things. Nobody else will do it for you.” Sam Pitroda was interacting with a group of about 50 children from Delhi’s slums and surrounding villages who met him in his office at the Knowledge Commission at his invitation.

“Do not tell me the problems. We all know them,” he responded when a young girl said ‘corruption was a big problem’. “Tell me how can it be dealt with?”

“We have to tell people not to give bribes. We have to change them,” said a young voice.

“You cannot change others. You have to change yourself,” remarked the visionary who brought the telecom revolution to India.

“If 50 of us decide never to bribe anyone or to accept bribes, we would have made a beginning,” he told the group.

He told them about the time when he went to a village as Rajiv Gandhi’s special advisor. “The village pradhan had prepared a long list of things that were not available in the village and he proceeded to read them out in front of a large gathering, thinking I would be able to set them right.

“I said: ‘I can’t. It is in your hands. If the teacher does not come to the school, has any villager ever volunteered to teach the students?’”

“In villages where there is no school, does anyone say, ‘My house is available for three hours everyday to run the classes’?” he questioned.

He told the children the meeting with them was part of a consultative process to learn from them their views and goals which would feed into the recommendations made by the Knowledge Commission to the Prime Minister.

“How could one improve the education system,” he asked.

A teenaged boy replied: “Education should be based on practicals, and not be rote based as it is at present.”

“Good,” said Pitroda.

“When we ask questions to our teachers we are made to shut up with either ‘you ask too many questions’ or ‘there is no answer to why’,” the young ones were quick to point out.
“Parents should let us pick the courses of our choice,” said another.

Pitroda could not have agreed more. He said, “Parenting in India has to change. The Indian parents do not allow their children to explore. They are constantly giving instructions.”

“But Sir, you should be telling that to our parents,” they pointed out.

“Yes, my next meeting should be with parents,” he said.

The children were inquisitive about him. One little girl asked: “What was the toughest day of your life?” The man was stumped. “No one has ever asked me that before. It was when I had the surgery following my second heart attack. The doctors cut me up here, and here,” he said pointing to his body. “I thought I would never come out of it alive.”

***
At the end of the meeting, I seek out the little girl. She stands less than 4 feet tall and looks barely eight. Priyanka turns out to be 11 years old and is badly undernourished. Her father is a tailor. An NGO is financing her studies as her family is too poor to send her to school.

“What has been your toughest day?” I ask her. She gives me a dazzling smile. “I haven’t had any,” she says.

No wonder Pitroda has such faith in India’s children.