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Punjab to start serving mid-day meals to UKG students this month
Until now, only students of classes 1 to 8 were served cooked meals, pre-primary sections were provided raw food material in packets under ICDS programme
Punjab will serve cooked hot meals to 1.94 lakh kids enrolled in the UKG section of government schools across the state from this month.
The state government will provide mid-day meals to UKG students in about 9,500 schools in the state following the approval from the central government under the PM POSHAN Abhiyaan, earlier known as the mid-day meal scheme. A budget of ₹39 crore has been sanctioned by the Union Ministry of Education (MoE) for providing nutritious meals to these children during the current financial year under the Balvatika project of the centrally-sponsored scheme. The approval is part of the ₹360-crore annual work plan and budget sanctioned by the central government for the state for the financial year 2023-24.
Education minister Harjot Singh Bains has called a meeting of top officials of school education and social security and development of women and children departments on August 9 to finalise the modalities and launch date. The mid-day meals are presently served to students of classes 1 to 8. The school education department of the Punjab government had submitted a proposal to the central ministry, which administers the scheme, for bringing 3.82 lakh children of pre-primary classes under the ambit of the programme. Of the 19,000 government schools, about 50% have pre-primary sections (LKG and UKG), and providing free cooked meals to them would have cost approximately ₹75 crore during the current financial year.
However, the PM Poshan project approval board (PAB) headed by Union school education and languages secretary Sanjay Kumar gave approval for serving cooked mid-day meals to UKG students. “The department has done the mapping of these children. They were getting raw food material in packets under the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) programme of social security, development of women and children department, but will now be provided nutritious cooked meals in schools from this month,” said Varinder Singh Brar, general manager, Punjab Mid-Day Meal Society. The remaining pre-primary children will continue to be under the ICDS. The central government, while renaming the scheme as PM Poshan two years ago, had announced the decision to provide mid-day meals to children receiving pre-primary education. In addition to UKG children, the PAB has also budgeted for cooked meals for 16.19 lakh children of primary (1-5) and upper primary (608) classes on 245 working days in 2023-24. Last year, the state government covered 88% and 85% of the students enrolled in primary and upper primary classes, respectively. While the central government bears the entire cost of food grains and their transportation, it shares the expenditure on payments to cooks, construction of kitchen-cum-stores, utensils and other kitchen devices with the state in a ratio of 60:40.
