Press Trust Of India
New Delhi, Oct 27: The possibility of providing mid-day meals during school holidays should be explored, a top HRD ministry official said Thursday in the context of the recent death of a Jharkhand girl due to starvation.
The official said while it has been established that the 11-year-old girl was not being denied mid-day meals, it was true that she could not get it due to school holidays.
“Can we think of some initiative for the poorest of the poor to provide them mid-day meals even during holidays?” Rina Ray, special secretary in the Department of School Education and Literacy under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, asked.
Under the mid-day meal scheme, every enrolled child, aged 6-14 years and studying in classes 1 to 8, is provided cooked meals meeting notified nutritional standards. The scheme comes under the HRD ministry’s Department of School Education and Literacy.
Ray was speaking at a conference here on implementation of the National Food Security Act, 2013, for children, lactating mothers and pregnant women, organised by the NHRC.
She conceded that any such move might have huge financial implications and that many schemes run by her department were already facing “financial crunch”.
Activists and the Jharkhand girl’s mother, Santoshi Kumari, have alleged that she died of starvation as her family’s ration card was cancelled due to non-linkage with Aadhaar. Officials, however, claimed that the girl, a resident of Jharkhand’s Simdega district, died of malaria.
Touching upon the contentious issue of Aadhar seeding, the HRD official emphasised that it was “not mandatory”, as she flagged concerns on leakages due to ghost enrollments. Quoting reports from four states, Ray said about five lakh ghost beneficiaries of the scheme have been found during the process of Aadhar linkage.
