Joint review mission: Central team in Bengal, begins review of mid-day meal scheme in schools

The Central team is led by Dr Anuradha Dutta, head of the department for foods & nutrition department of Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, which is based in Pantnagar, Uttarakhand.

After the meeting, Dutta told mediapersons that the team’s visit was a “routine programme.”

“It is a joint review mission, which is a routine programme of the Centre that is run in all the states every year. So, we are in Bengal as part of this programme. Your state has 34 districts. We will have to chalk out a plan to see how many we can cover in this set deadline. We will try to visit as many as possible,” Dutta told mediapersons. The Central team will be in Bengal from January 30-February 6.

According to sources, the team will be examining the height-weight ratio of some students to check whether the mid-day meal beneficiaries are being provided adequate nutritious food or not.

According to sources, the team will review 32 parameters, including school infrastructure, food quality, quantity etc before preparing a detailed report on it. During the visits, the team will also speak to schoolchildren and their parents.

The Central team’s arrival is at a time when the TMC government in Bengal and the Centre, as well as the TMC and BJP are at loggerheads over visits by such teams. Earlier, Central teams visited in two phases for investigating alleged malpractices in Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna.

The arrival of the central team has yet again triggered a political tussle in the state.

“Let there be a review, let there be an investigation. If you have not done anything wrong, what is there to worry and what is there to be scared of? You (referring to the state) said you will give chicken and meat in mid-day meal but none understood that you were referring to meat of lizard and rats,” said BJP’s
national vice-president Dilip Ghosh, in a reference to recent incidents of lizards and rats being found in cooked midday meal.

The TMC called the Central team’s visit an “effort to demean the works done by the state government.”

“It is vendetta politics being done to humiliate the state government and curb the development of the state,” said TMC MP Santanu Sen.

Earlier, Leader of Opposition and BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari had written to Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan urging him to send a central audit team to probe “PM Poshan (mid-day meal) scam in West Bengal”. He alleged in his letter “misappropriation of mid-day meal funds” and requested the Centre to send a team to inspect the implementation of the scheme.

On January 6-7, two central government teams arrived in Bengal to look into allegations of irregularities in allotment of houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). Earlier, just after one week of assembly election, the Centre had sent teams and members of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and National Commission for Women (NCW) to probe the post-poll violence, including alleged atrocities on women.

During the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020-2021, central teams visited Bengal over the TMC government’s perceived mishandling of the pandemic.

In November last year, the state BJP had demanded that a team of medical experts visit Bengal over a dengue outbreak.