MDM Menu Ma Ferfar Karva Babat Paripatra

The Mid-day Meal Scheme is a school meal programme of the Government of India designed to better the nutritional standing of school-age children nationwide.

The programme supplies free lunches on working days for children in primary and upper primary classes in government, government aided, local body, Education Guarantee Scheme, and alternate innovative education centres, Madarsa and Maqtabs supported under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and National Child Labour Project schools run by the ministry of labour.

Serving 120,000,000 children in over 1,265,000 schools and Education Guarantee Scheme centres, it is the largest of its kind in the world.

Under article 24, paragraph 2c of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which India is a party,India has committed to yielding "adequate nutritious food" for children. The programme has undergone many changes since its launch in 1995. 

The Midday Meal Scheme is covered by the National Food Security Act, 2013. The legal backing to the Indian school meal programme is akin to the legal backing provided in the US through the National School Lunch Act.

Mid Day Meal Scheme

The roots of the programme can be traced back to the pre-independence era, when a mid day meal programme was introduced in 1925 in Madras Corporation by the British administration. A mid day meal programme was introduced in the Union Territory of Puducherry by the French administration in 1930.

Initiatives by state governments to children began with their launch of a mid day meal programme in primary schools in the 1962–63 school year. Tamil Nadu is a pioneer in introducing mid day meal programmes in India to increase the number of kids coming to school; K. Kamaraj, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, introduced it first in Chennai and later extended it to all districts of Tamil Nadu.

During 1982, July 1 onwards, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. G. Ramachandran upgraded the existing Mid-day meal scheme in the state to 'Nutritious food scheme' keeping in the mind that 68 lakh children suffer malnutrition.

Gujarat was the second state to introduce an MDM scheme in 1984, but it was later discontinued.

A midday meal scheme was introduced in Kerala in 1984, and was gradually expanded to include more schools and grades. By 1990–91, twelve states were funding the scheme to all or most of the students in their area: 

Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh. Karnataka, Orissa, and West Bengal received international aid to help with implementation of the programme, and in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan the programme was funded entirely using foreign aid.

In Karnataka, Children's LoveCastles Trust started to provide mid-day meals in 1997. A total of eight schools were adopted and a food bank programme and an Angganwasi milk Programme were started. The food-bank programme was replaced by the State Government midday meal scheme.

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MDM મેનુમાં ફેરફાર કરવા બાબત 28/08/2024