Let's talk about classroom hunger!
Many of us who work in the field of education would not usually put these two words together. We associate classrooms with learning, teaching or sadly as in the case of many government and private schools “lack of learning”.
I was not keenly aware of this concept of classroom hunger until very recently. My closest engagement with this was with occasional review or proposing “solutions” to the Mid-day Meal (MDM) scheme or as it has been recently christened as PM POSHAN scheme. Over the years, working with multiple state government departments and interacting with senior education bureaucrats, I have seen how this monitoring, tracking and reporting of the mid-day-meal scheme takes up a disproportionate amount of time & mind-share. The other serious contender and culprit of the time and attention of senior bureaucrats is the sheer number of court cases they have to “personally appear” and deal with.
As you can imagine, we in the education sector often tend to talk about this as something of a compulsion and distraction for the entire system. It's not unusual to hear even from the teachers that this is an unwanted responsibility that takes away some part of the valuable teaching-learning time in the classrooms. When questioned about the poor learning outcomes of the children and the obvious gaps in the teaching-learning process teachers usually blame the lack of engagement of the community (parents) and having so many non-teaching responsibilities primary of them being the mid-day-meal scheme for children as a reason why they are not able to focus on children's learning. Some in the sector also call this out as one of the problems or reasons for limited “time-on-task”.
I would listen to such remarks and often respond with almost a reaction that I might have borrowed from somewhere "let us remember that for many children in our country, the mid-day-meal is probably the only nutritious meal of the day". I would just say it like a parrot without a deeper understanding of what I am saying or feeling the pain, the deprivation and the helplessness that unwanted hunger makes one feel and here we are talking about young children of age 6-14.
I began to grasp this problem with some understanding after listening to the experiences of my team members working in Bihar. One of my colleagues who works out of a district office of the state and has to undertake regular school visits as a part of his role was sharing with me ironically as we were having a team dinner at Patna, about his experiences and made this statement almost matter-of-factly “...during school visits, when I interact with children I do start with asking what they have had for breakfast in the morning, and most of the times children reply in the negative or look away in silence signaling unmistakably that they have not had anything to eat in the morning before they came to school…they come to school empty-stomach…"
His experience and understanding was first-hand, his feeling and pain was palpable. This made a different impact or at least deepened the understanding of the problem that this mid-day-meal scheme was trying to solve. Lest the analytical minds of people like me dismiss this as a one off incident or with questions of ‘how representative is it of the state wide situation’, a few weeks later at another team review meeting we had at least six of such colleagues confirm that a large majority of children do come to the school empty-stomach without anything to eat in the morning.
Please let that sink in. For a large number of children coming to our government schools, the mid-day-meal is not just the only healthy or nutritious meal of the day but probably the first meal of the day of any kind! This is the stark, sad reality of the large number of parents and the families who send their children to our government schools. There is such poverty, deprivation and helplessness that they cannot afford to feed their young children before sending them to school.
I would not be able to imagine, much less understand nor would many of you who are reading this, what kind of homes these children live in, what kind of jobs their parents work for, how little they earn, what kind of possessions they have or rather do not have! One can only vaguely imagine the relief and the reassurance these parents and families have when they know that their children will at least have something healthy and nutritious to eat around noon when the school serves a hot cooked meal to their child to eat. If this is the reality of our children and families that after 78 years of our independence, how likely it is to expect that we will be able to guarantee the child her right to education or the right to learn?
I was now able to understand or at least place in context, what some these colleagues shared as a part of their school observations “...children leave as soon as they have had their mid day meal” or the often quoted literature or anecdotal evidence that “..children come to the government schools only to have the mid-day-meal..”.
I was almost tempted to reply “why shouldn’t they?” It was becoming clearer to me that the parents are sending the kids to the government schools to get at least something they know that child will get i.e. a good nutritious meal. Now, many of us have come across so many reports or even have experienced ourselves the not-as-per-expectation quality of the meals served to children, reports of irregularity in the provision of food, occasional health hazards due to lack of attention during preparation etc. If anything, please let these incidents not take away from the massive effort of the Indian state to provide hot cooked meals to 120 million children across 1.2 million government schools daily! Remember the last time you and I invited around 10-15 friends and tried to host them for lunch/dinner maybe once-twice a month/quarter. Contrast that with the effort it takes for the government (with all of our allegations of poor capacity) to ensure 120 million children are provided cooked food across the length & breadth of the country across 1.2 million government schools. My senior colleagues shared with me that the provision of the mid day meal is being monitored almost as a highest priority with the number of children who are taking the mid-day-meal is tracked on a daily basis and the availability of adequate ration food-grains oils and other food materials is almost checked on a weekly basis.
It is in the backdrop of this extremely limited and non experiential understanding of the problem that I was invited to be a part of a discussion on school-meals organised by an established foundation, consulting companies and other sector exports. I would have reacted to the discussions in a very different manner, not atypical of people who are seen as sector experts or people who have been working with the governments for a long time by underestimating the efforts or saying “the government is already doing this, there is no need for anything else, it’s too difficult etc.”.
I tried to listen and heard a different but sincere articulation of the problem and the solution. The foundations or funders said that they believed that school meals provide some of the highest return on investment “...almost $9 for every $1 invested”. The consulting company shared that there are interesting models of financing additional expenditure required to provide meals to children. These discussions were focussed more on providing meals to complement and supplement the government's efforts such as providing a healthy breakfast to the children or a health drink towards the end of the day. Again many state governments have taken lead in this matter by taking steps such as in the state of Telangana where we work very closely with the education department, last year a breakfast scheme for children was introduced and also ragi health drink was provided to the children towards the end of the day. I remember the state government of Gujarat also providing milk and other supplements to children. There was an encouraging presentation by one of the civil society organisations funded by CSR which claimed that they are providing additional school meals to at least 10 million children across different parts of the country in the form of breakfast millet-laddus or health drinks. I could appreciate the efforts better as I had a slightly improved understanding of the problem through the experiences of my team.
When my turn came to share or contribute, I re-articulated what I heard from my senior colleague Kamal Nath Jha that the mid day meal scheme has at least four major objectives such as (a) removing classroom hunger, (b) ensuring nutrition of children, (c) fostering inclusion in school whereby children of different backgrounds, community eat & share their food together, and hopefully as a result of all this (d) children engage in learning and we are able to retain them in schools for longer.
I went on to add that the government is providing a lot of inputs to this scheme in terms of resources, time and attention and tracking them very meticulously but they do not monitor the outcomes and definitely not all the outcomes or objectives as my colleague articulated to me. To the best of my limited knowledge, currently we only have the NFHS which measures the percentage of “underweight” and “stunted” children once in 3 years and reports the same. This resonated with the people in the consultation who went on to add that at least nutrition can be tracked in more details such as percentage of Severely Malnourished and Moderately malnourished children (SAM & MAM as some would know).
I summarised that we need to track these critical outcomes much more reliably, consistently and regularly either individually or as a composite score so that we all raise awareness & understand the issue. Something similar to what the ASER report by Pratham has done for learning needs to be done for nutrition and classroom hunger.
Many years of working closely with the government schools we have come to understand and normalise the fact that the children who come to the government schools are actually coming because their parents do not have a choice and they cannot afford even the small fees charged by the so-called low-fee or “affordable” private schools. Now some of us are keenly aware that many of the parents who send their children to the government schools are the ones who are not able to provide them with two square meals a day. They only or the first outcome they want or expect this large, powerful and well-resourced system to deliver is removal of classroom hunger, proper nutrition for their children and retention in schools.
Can we at least try to ensure that?
