u/IdiotLiver

Source

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/kolkata/50-students-left-out-of-mid-day-meal-centre-seeks-report-from-state-10048974/

Never seen a greater fact-defying, politically motivated campaign than the ‘no egg’ outrage. The mid-day meal scheme was altogether stopped in West Bengal. Let alone egg or fish, nothing was being served for a while in the state’s schools.

The old mid-day meal implementation model in West Bengal was overhauled and restructured because it was plagued by persistent food hygiene scandals, severe fund mismanagement, and drastically declining student participation.

Rather than stopping the PM POSHAN scheme entirely, the new administration chose to dismantle the decentralised, school-level cooking system in favour of a centralised model due to several systemic breakdowns:

The previous system suffered from a string of high-profile safety failures. Media reports and government audits frequently flagged unhygienic preparation practices, which culminated in severe public backlash after recurring incidents where lizards, insects, and rats were discovered contaminating the cooked food.

A joint review mission and the Union Government’s Project Approval Board (PAB) raised major alarms over financial irregularities.

Audits revealed that local implementing agencies and municipal corporations were holding mid-day meal funds outside of the mandatory Single Nodal Agency (SNA) bank accounts, violating direct Central Government guidelines.

There were widespread allegations that the financial resources earmarked strictly for student nutrition were being leaked or diverted elsewhere.

Despite millions of students being enrolled on paper, actual utilisation data for 2024–2025 revealed a massive gap. Out of more than 1.13 crore enrolled students, only about 69% actually received or consumed the meals, meaning nearly half of the upper-primary school children (around 42%) were entirely skipping the provided food due to its poor quality.

The previous structure underpaid local cooking staff, with helpers making as little as ₹2,000 a month. This led to frequent kitchen strikes, supply chain disruptions, and highly inconsistent meal delivery across thousands of schools.

To rectify these breakdowns, the government increased the per-student material allocation from ₹6.50 to ₹10, increased cook salaries by ₹1,000, and moved the operational responsibilities to ISKCON's centralised kitchen model to eliminate local leakage and contamination.

Meanwhile, no organisation other than Iskcon came forward with a proposal and capacity for a prompt resumption of the programme. The said organisation dedicates its food first to Lord Krishna. They cannot obviously add eggs to that meal. The Ramakrishna Mission, whose Shakta sensibilities may allow it, neither came up with the offer nor do they serve outside RKM’s own schools. No secular NGO qualified or showed interest either. What alternative solution can one propose?

From the very beginning, I struggled to understand the underlying purpose of this exercise. What exactly are we hoping to accomplish by obsessively dissecting isolated clips and treating them as though they accurately represent an entire society? It seems remarkably hypocritical because we consistently criticize Western commentators for engaging in precisely the same practice with India. Whenever they cherry-pick a few disturbing incidents to portray the country in a negative light, we immediately object by saying, "Why are you nitpicking? Look at India as a whole instead of judging billions of people through a handful of videos." Yet, ironically, we appear perfectly willing to adopt the identical methodology when evaluating others. This selective outrage and intellectual inconsistency undermine the very principles we claim to defend. Instead of encouraging a balanced, nuanced, and evidence-based perspective, we are embracing the same reductionist approach that we routinely condemn. If deriving satisfaction or a misplaced sense of superiority from such superficial generalizations is the objective, then by all means, continue but it is difficult to see how this contributes to meaningful discourse or genuine understanding.