After the Dabbawallahs of Mumbai, it’s the turn of the world’s largest mid-day meal programme of rural India to make its way into the textbook of a premiere B-school, reports Chetan Chauhan.
After the Dabbawallahs of Mumbai, it’s the turn of the world’s largest mid-day meal programme of rural India to make its way into the textbook of a premiere B-school.
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The Harvard Business School (HBS) is all set to introduce a paper for the first-year MBA students where the midday meal programme would be taught as a case study to educate them on precise time management.
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Earlier, the daily food distribution process by dabbawallahs had become part of an undergraduate MBA course in Cambridge and MS University in United States.
Christine Ellis, a student of the business school and part of a team that visited India last year, to carry out a field study on the programme said that the time management starts from the preparation of the meal and lasts the entire distribution process.
“Any delay at any level can disrupt the entire chain and can lead to chaos. It is because of this precise time management that the scheme is running so well in Indian cities,” Ellis observed. She also found it to be a well-coordinated effort between the government, the NGOs and the parents and considered it to be a unique programme for success at any level.
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The Harvard business school students studied the mid-day meal scheme in urban centers of India, where food is cooked in a centralized modern kitchen and then distributed to thousands of schools within a few hours. The centralized kitchens are unique to urban centers as in rural areas the kitchens have been constructed in the schools itself.
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The Harvard business school students studied the mid-day meal scheme in urban centers of India, where food is cooked in a centralized modern kitchen and then distributed to thousands of schools within a few hours. The centralized kitchens are unique to urban centers as in rural areas the kitchens have been constructed in the schools itself.
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In Bangalore, the food is distributed to approximately 3,000 government schools in two hours, once the meal is ready. Each van used for the midday meal programme is assigned a certain number of schools for food distribution.
"The vans deliver the meal in each school and then waits at the last school for children to finish the meal. On its way back, it collects the empty vessels,” said Chanchalapathi Das, vice-chairperson of Akshaya Patra, the NGO that runs the scheme in Bangalore.
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Similar kitchens operate in cities like Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata.
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.
