Some children in Andhra Pradesh’s Nalgonda district refuse to eat the mid-day meal served in school. It is not good, say their parents, as the food is cooked by Dalits, reports Chetan Chauhan.
Some children in Andhra Pradesh’s Nalgonda district refuse to eat the mid-day meal served in school. It is not good, say their parents, because the food is cooked by Dalits.
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G Malliah, president of the Pathy Suryapetha village gram panchayat, said: "Yes, some parents don't allow their children to eat food in school because a Dalit cooks it. For a few parents we cannot snatch the livelihood of a Dalit woman."
But, Malliah adds we cannot force the children to have a meal.
Yamamma, a Class III student of the primary school, is one of them. “My parents told me not to eat the food in school. They say food is not good.”
The discrimination is prevalent in Nalgonda and Rangareddy districts that are dominated by the upper caste Reddy community. But it is not limited to Andhra. In parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, upper castes don't allow Dalits to be employed as cooks or even serve the food. Their children also sit separately from the lower caste children.
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P Sanjeev Reddy, a local Telegu Desam Party leader, says the mid-day meal is an incentive for child labourers to attend school. The education department with the help of the village Child Rights Forum identifies the child and then convinces the parents to send them to school. For decades, children have been employed in farms by the major land holding Reddy community. But efforts of MY Foundation, an NGO, and village panchayats have ensured that almost all children attend school.
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P Sanjeev Reddy, a local Telegu Desam Party leader, says the mid-day meal is an incentive for child labourers to attend school. The education department with the help of the village Child Rights Forum identifies the child and then convinces the parents to send them to school. For decades, children have been employed in farms by the major land holding Reddy community. But efforts of MY Foundation, an NGO, and village panchayats have ensured that almost all children attend school.
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"For many children the mid-day meal is the only nutrition they get in a day. So, it helps in convincing parents," says Reddy.
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.
