The Uttarakhand Government has allotted a sum of Rs12 crore to the Education Department to provide more nutritious foods while serving mid day meal (MDM) in the Government schools of State.
The students would now able to get egg, seasonal fresh fruits or gur papadi once in a week along with their regular MDM. The Department would spend a sum of Rs5 per student per week to fortify the meal of the students with additional nutrition. The proposal to add more taste and nutrition to the MDM was mooted to the State Government by the State-level project management committee of MDM.
The Government accepted the proposal and sanctioned the budget for it recently.
Joint Director, MDM, P K Bisht said the Department had received the budget and has been allotted the same to different districts.
He further informed some districts have already started providing eggs and other nutritious edible food items along with MDM and remaining districts would follow suit soon. Bisht said the initiative would benefit about 8 lakh students of 17,659 Government schools of the State. The teachers are free to choose between fruits, eggs or gur papadi to distribute it among the students. “Providing egg to students is good but it has put an additional burden on us which has to maintain a separate entry in the register. Further, some students have allergies for eggs; we have to be careful while giving eggs to the students,” said one of the teachers of a Government school.
Under the MDM, the schools are supposed to provide meals at the rate of Rs3.76 per day per child in primary schools and Rs5.64 in Upper Primary schools. The Union Government and State Government bear the cost of MDM in the ratio of 75: 25 respectively. The schools are provided food grains (rice and wheat) while they had to manage other food items on their own from the budget provided. The teachers are given responsibility for managing MDM in their schools while Bhojan Matas are employed in the schools to prepare the meal for the students.
Apart from attracting students to the schools, increase enrollments and reduce caste based discriminations the major objective of the scheme is to provide food having requisite calories and protein content to the students.