Healthy food and yoga to be in schools

Updated on: Nov 22, 2011, 20:08:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Health is wealth. With this slogan, the government wants to promote healthy Indian food and yoga among school children. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Health is wealth. With this slogan, the government wants to promote healthy Indian food and yoga among school children.

Indian schools present both sides of bad health --- malnutrition and obesity. Majority of children in poor parts of rural India were found to be malnourished in a study in 2009 whereas over 20% of children in private schools in urban India were obese. With obesity children have reported hypertension and diabetes.

The main cause for rising obesity among children in urban India has been attributed to high consumption of junk food. The issue was hotly debated in a Planning Commission sub-group on secondary education and a need to stipulate some guidelines on healthy lifestyle was felt.

The panel's committee in its report has suggested that school canteens should become "socially responsible outlets" for healthy food. The canteens should serve food items which are nutritious and meets the energy needs of a child, rather than demand driven junk food.

The recommendation comes after the health ministry supported a ban on junk food in schools canteens in a reply to a petition filed in Delhi high court.

Replacing junk food with healthy food could be an implementation issue in schools. So, the committee has suggested constituting of health and wellness clubs in schools which apart from creating infrastructure for sports and physical education could prescribe the daily menu for school canteens.

Along with healthy food, the committee wants the children to take up more physical activities including yoga, especially in urban areas, where most children are glued to television or computer games.

"Positive health message when reinforced from an early age will result in bringing up healthy adults," the report submitted to the government said and added that the concept of parent advocates should be introduced for their bigger participation in the process.

To start with, the committee said its recommendations can be implemented in the central government run Kendriya Vidalayas and Navodaya Vidalayas. An idea accepted by the HRD ministry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More