Midday Meal Scheme

• A new study on the inter-generational benefits of India’s midday meal scheme has published in Nature Communications.
• The study used the nationally representative data on cohorts of mothers and their children by birth year and socio-economic status spanning 23 years.
• It is a first-of-its-kind inter-generational analysis of the impacts of a mass feeding programme.

Key findings:

• By 2016, the prevalence of stunting was significantly lower in areas where the scheme was implemented in 2005.
• The scheme was associated with 13-32% of the improvement in the height-for-age z-scores in India between 2006 and 2016.
• Girls who had access to free lunches provided at government schools had children with a higher height-to-age ratio than those who did not.
• The study noted that interventions to improve maternal height and education must be implemented years before those girls and young women become mothers.

• The linkages between midday meals and lower stunting in the next generation were stronger in the lower socio-economic strata and likely work through women’s education, fertility, and the use of health services.
• The interruptions to schooling and to the midday meal scheme could have even longer term impacts, hurting the nutritional health of the next generation as well.

Issues:

• More than one in three Indian children are stunted, or too short for their age, which reflects chronic undernutrition.

• Stunting i.e, low height for age, is caused by long-term insufficient nutrient intake and frequent infections.
• The fight against stunting has often focussed on boosting nutrition for young children.
• But nutritionists have argued that maternal health and well-being is the key to reduce stunting in their offspring.

Midday Meal Scheme:

• Mid Day Meal Scheme was started in India from 15th August 1995 under the name of ‘National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE)’.
• In October 2007, NP-NSPE was renamed as ‘National Programme of Mid Day Meal in Schools,’ which is popularly known as Mid-Day Meal Scheme.
• It is a centrally sponsored scheme hence cost is shared between the centre and the states.
• It is the world’s largest school meal programme aimed to attain the goal of universalization of primary education.

• Provides cooked meals to every child within the age group of six to fourteen years studying in classes I to VIII who enrolls and attends the school.
• Its objective is to address hunger and malnutrition, increase enrolment and attendance in school, improve socialisation among castes, provide employment at grassroot level especially to women.
• It covers all government and government aided schools, Madarsa and Maqtabs supported under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA).
• Tamil Nadu is the first state to implement the midday meal scheme.