A simple meal nourishing ambitious education mission

Orvakal, Kurnool, Feb 14 (UNI) It is half past noon at Pudicherla primary school in this rain deficient district of Andhra Pradesh.

Children squatting on a pukka flour in a room are eagerly waiting for their mid-day meal, which for many of them might be the only meal of the day.

As one watches them savouring steaming rice, dal and sambhar, one hardly realises that this simple meal is nourishing one of the world's most ambitious education mission.

Parents of most of these students are field workers who are hardly able to arrange two square meals a day for their children.

The food is served under the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education which was launched in 1995 and is the largest programme of its kind in the world.

The aim of the scheme is to universalise primary education.

''The mid-day meal has proved to be a great incentive for poor parents to send their children to school,'' says school principal P Maruthi while narrating to a group of visiting journalists some of the innovative practices within the scheme his school and others in the district have adopted in retaining and enrolling students.

To ensure the food served is fresh and good in quality, the school has adopted a model in which mother of the students themselves are involved in monitoring the programme, he said.

As state education secretray Dr P Krishnaiah Rao out it ''There can be no better watch than a mother's watch,'' it was with this in mind that this model of monitoring has been adopted.

Mothers committee's have been formed in every school in the state, he said.

Besides monitoring, mothers are also involved in cooking of the food as almost all of them are part of the village self-help groups which in most of the cases are also suppliers of the food to the school.

These groups are organised under a federation, the Mandal Mahila Samakya which has taken the responsibility of implementinmg mid-day meal scheme in primary and upper primary schools.

The Orvakal Mandal federation provides cooking utensils to implementing agencies and is running an ''Apna Bazar'' shop which supplies ingredients on a credit basis for the Mid Day Meal Scheme.

There are 25 primary schools and 12 upper primary schools and two alternative schools in the Orvakal mandal of the district and the Mid Day Meal scheme is being implemented in all these schools.

The Pudicherla school principal says the mid-day meal ensures almost hundred per cent attendance in the school, still if a student remains absent continuously for three days then a teacher goes to his or her home to know the reason, and if parents are not there, the teachers go to the farm where they work to find them and persuade them to send the student back to school.

The school is also making sanitary napkins and providing these to girls who have attained the age of puberty. Teachers tell them how to use these. ''In the absence of these facilities many girls on attaining puberty would just hesitate to go to school.

The introduction of this practice has helped a lot in checking drop out rates for girls, said a lady teacher in the school while showing students at work to make the napkins.

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