Bihar had hit the headlines in July 2013 when altogether 23 school children had died after having mid-day meal in Gandaman village of Saran district. But this time, the State has hogged the limelight securing the fifth position among the best performing States in providing mid-day meal in schools. Bihar has now come forward keeping States of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Tripura behind.
"We are in the fifth position among best performing States in mid-day meal schemes for school children", State Education Minister PK Shahi said, while addressing the media on Monday. The admirable position of fifth rank has been given on assessing indices like coverage, hot meal and nutritional value of food served.
"It all happened because of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's sustained emphasis on the scheme in schools meant for the poor children", said an Education Department official.
Earlier, all together 23 children had died after having poisonous mid-day meal in the primary school of Gandaman in Saran district on July 16.
After the incident, the State Government took several steps to streamline the scheme by launching Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) developed by an IT company for daily details of implementation of mid-day meals provided by schools across the State.
"The details are just a click away and it has also attracted many States to emulate the experiment", said the State Education Minister PK Shahi.
It is said that the site comprises details like number of children, how many of them served food and menu of the meal among others.
The Minister also said that though the daily details on the website show almost 95 per cent coverage of children under the scheme, but the department instead of blindly relying on them also cross-check the facts through random inspection of schools.
At present, the Centre is paying Rs 3.67 per child under the mid-day meal scheme for students from Class I to V and Rs 5 each for those in Class VII and VIII. While taking a dig at the meager amount, Shahi said that it did not cover expenses of rice, vegetable, pepper, fuel, salt and pulses to be provided to every eligible child as the prices have been soaring everyday.
He added that earlier he has been demanding an increase of Rs 6 per child from Class I to V and Rs 10 each for students of Class VII and VIII.
"Now after taking lesson from the Gandaman incident, the State Government has broad based the school committee to 17 members, headed by ward counselors of the area to monitor quality of food served to children under the scheme. The number of women as committee members are more than the men so this committee is also known as Mata Committee", explained the Education Minister.
The Minister added that a sum of Rs 100 crore has been released for constructing kitchen in the schools for preparing safe and hygienic mid-day meal. "The State Government is also in the process of recruiting 67,000 woman cooks with preference to those coming from SC/ST and OBC caste at a monthly payment of Rs 1,000 to keep teachers away from the task of preparing food", he added.