- Milk will soon be an integral part of the midday meal scheme to ensure proper nutrition to all students in government schools across the country, which is in tune with Prime Minister’s aim to make a malnutrition-free India.
- The Women and Child Development (WCD) and Education Ministries are working in a coordinated way to meet the Prime Minister’s vision of providing nutritious meals to the students in government schools.
- All the officials linked to the departments concerned dealing with the policies have been directed by both the ministries on the 3rd ‘Rashtriya Poshan Maah’
- To expedite changes in midday meal by including milk soon after the schools resume functioning with attendance by children.
- The Prime Minister had in 2018 launched ‘Poshan Abhiyaan’– a robust scheme which has been playing an important role in eliminating malnutrition from the country.
- On this ‘Poshan Maah 2020’, Government planned to focus on an intensive campaign across the country for the holistic nourishment of children with severe acute malnutrition.
- All the state governments have been told to implement the new midday meal policy which includes milk.
- Earlier, the then HRD Ministry had revised its midday meal policy in 2016.
- All students from Classes 1 to 8 in all government schools will be given 200 ml milk every day along with the midday meals.
- The states were earlier also directed to include milk and milk products in the midday meals so that these items could be procured from cooperative milk unions or federations.
- Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Puducherry, and Gujarat have confirmed supply of milk through schools but some states with higher surplus stocks of milk powder like Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab are yet to decide in this regard.
- As per government norms, every child should receive 150-200 ml milk.
- The Mid-day Meal Scheme is a school meal programme of the Government of India designed to better the nutritional standing of school-age children nationwide.
- The programme supplies free lunches on working days for children in
- primary and upper primary classes in government,
- government aided, local body, Education Guarantee Scheme, and
- alternate innovative education centres, Madarsa and Maqtabs supported under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and
- National Child Labour Project schools run by the ministry of labour.
- Under article 24, paragraph 2c of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which India is a party, India has committed to yielding “adequate nutritious food” for children.
- The Midday Meal Scheme is covered by the National Food Security Act, 2013.
- The Mid-Day meal officially started in the state of Tamil Nadu.
- The roots of the programme can be traced back to the pre-independence era, when a mid-day meal programme was introduced in 1925 in Madras Corporation by the British administration.
- A mid-day meal programme was introduced in the Union Territory of Puducherry by the French administration in 1930.
- Initiatives by state governments to children began with their launch of a mid-day meal programme in primary schools in the 1962–63 school year.
- The government of India initiated the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (NP-NSPE) on 15 August 1995.
