Schools to have nutrition meters

Say goodbye to pizza, burger and aerated drinks! Welcome the traditional Indian delicacies in school canteens that will also have, in addition, nutrition meters to gauge the child?s health based on diet.

Published on: Apr 13, 2006, 14:42:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Say goodbye to pizza, burger and aerated drinks! Welcome the traditional Indian delicacies in school canteens that will also have, in addition, nutrition meters to gauge the child’s health based on diet.

The Union Ministry for Women and Child Development has come out with this prescription for schools in Delhi and other urban areas to check the problem of obesity and calcium deficiency among kids.

“In this way, we can create awareness about healthy Indian food in schools,” Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury told HT.

The measure has been prompted by a recent study conducted by the American Association of Osteoporosis. Quoting the study, officials say that about 35.5 per cent children in Delhi’s top schools suffer from varying degrees of calcium deficiency.

The cause for this calcium deficiency is the high intake of junk food. It was found that 12 per cent of the children eat junk food in school canteens and 47 per cent consume at least one bottle of aerated drink every day. The study also observed the high rate of obesity.

7.5 per cent of the 3,000 kids examined in Delhi were found to be obese and 23 per cent of them were found grossly over-weight. “You can understand the problem as 82 per cent of the population is below 18 years of age,” she observed.

SMART BOX

Health check
• Nutrition meter to be handled by the teacher
• To prevent obesity/calcium deficiency among kids
• Measure prompted by a study that found high calcium deficiency in
schoolgoing children in urban India, especially in Delhi
• Self-help groups may supply food to school canteens

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

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