Midday meal row: As Bengal drops eggs, recalling Tamil Nadu’s century-long efforts to nourish schoolkids

The decision has also prompted comparisons with Tamil Nadu, which pioneered the concept of midday meals in India as the Madras Presidency, and has provided eggs under its programme for decades now.

The comparison, however, goes beyond eggs. Tamil Nadu’s midday meal programme has steadily evolved over the last century, with successive governments repeatedly revisiting what children should be fed, and why.

Getting children into school…

Chief minister K Kamaraj is often credited with introducing a school meal programme in Madras State in 1956. But he had built on decades of experiments within the pre-independence Madras Presidency to get children into schools.

The first publicly funded school meal experiment in Madras Presidency began in 1920 as part of an effort to expand compulsory elementary education.

Officials recognised that poverty, hunger and families’ dependence on children’s earnings kept many children out of school. They also realised that compulsory education could not be achieved through coercive tactics alone. Against this backdrop, the Madras Corporation turned to school meals as an incentive to attract and retain children in classrooms, writes historian Catriona Ellis in her 2023 book Imagining Childhood, Improving Children: The Emergence of an ‘Avuncular’ State in Late Colonial South India.

Justice Party president P Theagaraya Chetty. (Wikimedia Commons)

By most accounts, Justice Party president P Theagaraya Chetty, who was also president of the Madras Corporation Council, recommended that a midday meal scheme be introduced to benefit the state’s impoverished children. At his behest, President A Subbarayalu Reddiar, the first chief minister of Madras Presidency, introduced such a scheme at the Cochrane Basin Corporation School in Madras city’s Thousand Lights area in 1920, according to Ellis and other sources.

Chetty argued that the scheme would benefit the school’s 165 students, all from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, while encouraging parents to keep their children in school. The meals helped offset the loss of children’s earnings when they remained in school instead of working, with officials favouring such measures over punitive action for non-attendance.

The daily cost per head was capped at one anna. Yet the scheme quickly proved its value. In Imagining Childhood, Improving Children, Ellis notes that in 1926, Singaravelu Chetty, who would later become one of India’s pioneering Communist leaders, argued that it should be expanded as schools serving meals recorded attendance of about 90%.

Ellis also notes that attendance reportedly dropped by 50% when the scheme was briefly suspended in 1927. Even when faced with budget cuts, councillors defended the meals for children as “an incentive for them to go to school” and part of “advancing education, which is the primary duty of the Corporation”.

By the end of the decade, the debate had shifted from getting children into school to ensuring they could learn once they were there. In 1930, the Madras Corporation declared: “If you cannot feed the body of a child, you cannot feed the brain.”

For Ellis, that shift remained rooted in education rather than public health. “Hungry children can’t concentrate on learning; they might be in school but they can’t learn anything if they’re hungry,” she told The Indian Express.

…and keeping them there

By the 1930s, education authorities in Madras increasingly treated children’s health as central to their educational mission, Ellis writes.

Corporation debates increasingly focused on the nutritional value of school meals, the need for a balanced diet and the quality of food provided to children. Officials debated whether bread and milk were preferable to the usual rice-and-curd diet, but also whether children should be served food familiar to them.

“The key conclusion was that it was more important to provide food that the children would like and eat, than to focus on the most efficient or nutritious food,” Ellis said. “Providing food similar to what the children would have eaten at home seems to be a way of helping school feel familiar and safe, and therefore a place to learn.”

Madras State chief minister K Kamaraj radically widened the midday meal experiment. (Express Archive)

Medical inspection increasingly accompanied school meals, reinforcing the idea that schools were responsible not only for education but also for nutrition and physical development. Health, nutrition and education increasingly came to be seen as interconnected.

This marked a wider shift in how the state viewed children. They were increasingly described as future citizens whose health and education justified public spending, writes Ellis.

However, this political concern did not always translate into adequate funding. Ellis notes that a proposal to increase the midday meal budget from Rs 20,000 to Rs 50,000 was rejected on grounds of cost, even after councillors from both the Justice Party and the Congress claimed responsibility for children’s welfare.

According to Ellis, the programme was intended for poor children across communities but its beneficiaries were predominantly Dalit children, reflecting the poverty patterns of the time.

Widening the experiment, and introducing eggs

The next major milestone came after Independence, when chief minister Kamaraj expanded the school meal programme in 1956 as part of his push for universal elementary education.

The scheme was later transformed under chief minister M G Ramachandran’s Nutritious Meal Programme in 1982, which placed greater emphasis on children’s nutritional needs alongside improving school attendance.

In January 1989, Chief Minister M Karunanidhi announced that children covered under the Nutritious Meal Programme would receive one boiled egg every two weeks. The accompanying government order laid out detailed procedures for procuring, inspecting and supplying eggs across the state. The introduction of eggs built on a decades-long evolution of the programme, which increasingly linked children’s nutrition with their ability to learn.

Ellis believes those debates continue to resonate today.

“I wonder if that’s an important principle in the current debates too,” she said. “It’s about establishing that a child has a right to be in school because its family culture and food practices are respected.”

Successive governments expanded both the frequency of egg distribution and the menu itself, adding bananas, fortified foods and other nutritional supplements. In 2013, Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa introduced the Variety Meals scheme to expand the nutritional value and appeal of the midday meal programme.

Today, eggs individually weighing at least 46 grams are served five days a week along with nutritious variety meals in Tamil Nadu. The state says that each egg supplies 6.12 g of protein and 80 kcal of energy.

All-India efforts

In 1984, Kerala became the country’s second state to have a school lunch programme. Over the next few years, many other states launched their own versions of the scheme, and finally in 1995, the Centre stepped in. It was launched as a centrally sponsored scheme across 2,408 blocks for students up to Class 5, initially providing foodgrains to states.

In 2001, following a landmark Supreme Court order, states were directed to provide cooked mid-day meals rather than dry rations. In 2007, the UPA government expanded the scheme to Class 8.

In 2021, the scheme was renamed PM POSHAN. It’s among the largest initiatives in the world to enhance the nutrition levels of school-going children through hot cooked meals.