What About Midday Meals

                                                                                           Proff. R. S. Sengar and Others

Few foods expose India's fault lines as sharply as the egg on a school student's lunch plate. That is why West Bengal's latest midday meal controversy became more than a change of menu and blew into a political storm. Soon after the BJP formed the government in the state on May 9, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari announced that cooked midday meals in around 1,800 government and government-aided schools in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) area would be prepared by the Annamrita Foundation, an NGO associated with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON.

Since the organisation follows a strictly vegetarian tradition, the decision effectively meant that eggs would soon be replaced by soya, paneer, rajma and pulses in the school meal.

The move might have not been seen as such an acute anomaly in any other state, but in Bengal, fish, meat and eggs are part of everyday food culture for the overwhelming majority. Opposition parties accused the new BJP government of pushing vegetarianism through the back door. Parents asked why a religious organisation's dietary code should determine what children in government schools eat. Teachers warned that eggs were not just another item on the menu but a reason some children from poor households came to school.

The backlash forced a retreat. On July 29, Adhikari announced that, from August 1, while ISKCON would still provide vegetarian meals as part of a pilot project, self-help groups (SHGs) would supply eggs separately. Eggs would also be reintroduced in the 185 KMC-run schools where ISKCON had already been providing vegetarian meals under the previous Trinomial Congress (TMC) regime. "Along with them, the state government, through SHGs, will provide eggs to the students for protein," Adhikari said, citing the Odessa model.

The egg is back in Bengal, but the controversy cracked open a larger national divide: why should children in some states get eggs in school and not in others? Should a child's access to cheap protein depend on state politics, local food habits, religious sentiment, cost, logistics or the preferences of centralised vegetarian meal suppliers? And in a country still battling child malnutrition, should politics be allowed to override children's health?

NATIONAL FAULT LINE

India's midday meal programme, rechristened Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman, or PM POSHAN, feeds roughly 112 million children across 1.04 million schools, making it the world's largest such programme. Its promise was simple: a hot cooked meal would draw children to school, improve attendance and provide a basic nutritional floor. Yet that floor is uneven. The Centre prescribes calorie and protein norms, supplies free food grain and shares cooking costs with states. But state governments decide menus. The result is a peculiar geography of nutrition (see The Great Egg Divide). In one state, a child may receive eggs six days a week. In another, never.

The working count from state inputs is stark: only 16 of 28 states and four of eight Union Territories include eggs in regular PM POSHAN or state-funded supplementary school meal menus. Sixteen do not. The egg-serving states are concentrated largely in the South, East and parts of the Northeast: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Assam, Tripura and a few others with varying frequency and coverage. The egg-free or largely vegetarian list includes Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Maharashtra, Goa and Delhi.

This is the great egg divide. It is not strictly defined by party politics, though politics is never far away. A BJP government in Karnataka introduced eggs in 2021-22 under Basavaraj Bommai despite resistance from religious groups. NDA-ruled Andhra Pradesh continues to serve eggs five days a week. BJP-ruled Uttarakhand provides eggs or fruits once a week, with skimmed milk twice a week. Yet BJP-ruled or BJP-influenced political ecosystems in UP, Gujarat, Rajasthan, MP and Maharashtra have favoured vegetarian menus or withdrawn state funding for eggs, Congress- or Opposition-ruled states are not uniform either. The divide is shaped by a mix of ideology, food habits, caste hierarchies, supplier models, state finances and administrative convenience.

The irony is that the introduction of the egg in school meals was itself a political act, though one rooted in welfare populism. India's school-feeding experiments began in Madras in 1925. In the 1960s, Tamil Nadu chief minister K. Kamaraj turned the midday meal into a wider educational initiative.

Writer: Professor R. S. Sengar, Dean College of Biotechnology and Director Training and Placement, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel University of Agriculture and Technology, Modipuram, Meerut.