Meal for upper primary cooks over slow fire

The Cabinet has cleared a loosely-outlined plan that upgrades the mid-day meal scheme to include children above primary school and provides ...

The Cabinet has cleared a loosely-outlined plan that upgrades the mid-day meal scheme to include children above primary school and provides funding for cooking.

Within days of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi8217;s letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking repositioning of the scheme, the HRD Ministry proposed an additional Rs 1,500 crore to expand its coverage to students in classes 5-8 as well as to provide a rupee per child as cooking cost.

However, the proposal did not identify the schools whose upper primary classes would be taken up in the expanded scheme. Instead, it left the coverage to schools that opted for it and demonstrated their preparedness.

The government will provide Rs 2,000 as a one-time grant to each school that joins the expanded scheme. It is only from next year that schools in educationally backward blocks would be targeted. Once that is achieved, the aim is to expand to cover the entire country from 2006.

The haste, said sources, is also reflected by the subsidy being provided on cost incurred in 8216;8216;converting the foodgrains into cooked meal8217;8217;. No empirical calculations have been done to justify the cooking cost, they said.

As a ballpark figure, the conversion cost has been assumed at Rs 2 to Rs 2.50 per child of which the Centre is willing to bear half the amount.

Similar ad-hocism is reflected in the hike in subsidy on transport of foodgrains from the nearest distribution centre. The Centre8217;s contribution has been raised to Rs 100 for far-flung areas and Rs 75 for nearer areas from the current universal Rs 50 without any data to support the raise.

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Sources said that both Planning Commission and the Department of Expenditure were of the opinion that the scheme and its monitoring be transferred to the states. However, the Cabinet decided to continue with central control for fear of Supreme Court8217;s repeated directives.

Though Sonia8217;s letter had suggested time-bound results with more funds to achieve the promise set out in the Common Minimum Programme CMP, the proposal did not address the increase in Centre8217;s allocation to 75 per cent from current 50 per cent in view of the fiscal crunch being faced by many states.

In its CMP, the UPA has promised that government spending on education would be raised to at least six per cent of the GDP of which half the amount would be earmarked for primary and secondary education.