Predictably, there is a lot of frothing on my news feed at this. Oh, look no surprise! Modi wants to handover our children to PepsiCo Its still 11.30 am. There still time. I would say first get out of your bloody armchair, go find the nearest government school (which is not supported by Akshaya Patra or similar NGO) and have the mid-day meal with the children. They will be happy to serve you, there will be plenty of rice. Yes that is the problem, plenty of rice in unsupported government school mid -day meals! For years there has been a campaign to keep mid-day meals freshly cooked, without offering a single solution on how to reliably add protein to 107 million meals. Knowing ground realities -- which read like -- meal preferences, supply chain issues, storage issues and finally corruption -- we continue to dodge the issue of protein poverty. We are still stuck with filling stomachs, but with what are we doing it? Unsupported mid-day meals are almost 100% percent carbohydrate, with a sprinkling of vegetable protein in the form of a watery day. There is no scope to serve milk or eggs reliably. Unspent FCI (Food Corporation of India) stocks are dumped at schools, boiled and served. There is no budget to buy vegetables by the local school master at market prices and sometimes barely enough funds to buy spices. Every time you sit around and go on about how we cant produce anything but cricketers, there is only one reason for it - protein poverty. We aint going to produce no athlete or footballer. Our kids just never build muscles, where can they start training? You build athletic strength from ages 8-16, what do our kids, especially from rural areas eat in that age group -- carbs. Sports Authority of India cant work miracles with undernourished post-16 year olds. And I am not even going near vitamins and micronutrients, and how we will get them. This crisis IMHO, right now, needs a quick out-of-the-packet solution which can work around the ground realities mentioned above. Yes, we need to work at local solutions, I am personally working on one right now to supplement the mid-day meal at the small government school at Kalap. Every local school unfortunately would require its own custom-made solution and kids are growing while the solution gets to fruition. RIght now, I would NOT refuse a packed protein supplement for our school kids.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 06:02:18 +0000
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