Mayawati’s food tracking system for schools gets HRD nod
Inspired by the way Mayawati government, the Central government has decided to replicate the Uttar Pradesh model to track mid-day meal scheme to cross-check if children get their hot meal in schools. Chetan Chauhan reports.
Inspired by the way Mayawati government, the Central government has decided to replicate the Uttar Pradesh model to track mid-day meal scheme to cross-check if children get their hot meal in schools.
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The HRD ministry has decided to have a nation-wide short messaging service (SMS) alert system to monitor the Rs 10,000 crore mid-day meal scheme. Under the scheme, the school children till upper primary level are provided hot cooked meal once a day.
Mayawati government in UP was the first to introduce a software based SMS system, wherein the school principal and a few parents received an automatic message the day less than 50 percent or a large number of school children were served mid-day meal.
The SMS was generated on basis of information on mid-day meal feed by teacher in-charge of the scheme into an online monitoring system. The principal was required to give an explanation through SMS and parents to verify the claim.
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A senior HRD ministry official said the national system will be improvement of the UP model and no money will be charged from parents for sending an SMS system to the national server. A successful pilot has been implemented in Bihar and the ministry expects to cover 12 lakh schools across India by June this year.
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A senior HRD ministry official said the national system will be improvement of the UP model and no money will be charged from parents for sending an SMS system to the national server. A successful pilot has been implemented in Bihar and the ministry expects to cover 12 lakh schools across India by June this year.
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Every school will have to feed information regarding the mid-day meal served to children every day and the type of food. They will be required to provide details about the quantity of food-grains they received and the amount used.
The entire information generated would be in public domain on the new mid-day meal website. “It will help in curbing corruption and ensure that children get good quality food,” HRD minister Kapil Sibal said, after launching the website on which the mid-day meal scheme information will be available.
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The UPA government has been critical of UP government over implementation of Central schemes and had detected irregularities in National Rural Health Mission and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. But, the government had no problem in adopting a UP’s innovation.
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.
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