The Centre on Thursday claimed Bihar was warned about the quality of mid-day meals supplied in 12 districts, but the fact remains that just a week ago, the HRD Ministry had praised the State on record for implementation of the scheme.
While Bihar on Thursday denied receiving any such warning, intriguingly the Centre has sent the same officer, who had suggested others to follow the Bihar model of mid-day meal scheme (MDMS), to take stock of the Saran tragedy
In a letter dated July 8, 2013 to all the State Education Department, HRD Ministry had pointed that ‘data indicates Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka have improved significantly since last year, but Bihar has improved tremendously on this front’.
“Although the coverage of children in the State is still below the national average, it has gone up to 67% from 43% last year,” HRD Additional Secretary Amarjit Singh, Elementary Education-MDMS, had said in a letter to the State Secretaries, Principal Secretaries and heads of the department involved in implementation of MDMS.
While showering praise on Bihar, the HRD Ministry had criticised Gujarat and indicated Delhi and Himachal Pradesh needed to pull up their socks as far as financial issues are concerned. The Joint Review Missions for MDMS found that 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the sampled children in Gujarat and Delhi were found with low BMI and the coverage of children under MDMS was less than the national average.
The performance in these States were on coverage of children vis-à-vis enrolment, coverage of working days, utilisation of food grains, cooking cost, Transportation Assistance, MME and payment of honorarium to cook-cum-helpers.
HRD Minister MM Pallam Raju on Thursday said Bihar was issued warning by the monitoring committee early this year after some shortcomings in the implementation of the programme were identified. “There were 12 districts which were identified and alerts were sent and Saran was among them,” Raju said, adding that currently he does not want to entangle in a blame game as the death of the children have shocked all.
The Bihar Government has denied receiving any alert from the Centre over shortcomings in its implementation and insisted that the food was ‘poisonous’. “No such alert was issued to us. In the meeting of project approval board, a study by AN Sinha Institute of Social Science and Jamia Milia Islamia had pointed out that in many places standard of hygiene was not maintained on which the Government acted promptly,” Principal Secretary Education Amarjeet Sinha told reporters.