- One of the most critical components of pushing ahead with education reforms in the Indian ecosystem is ensuring that the dropout percentage of enrolled children is reduced to the minimum. At the best of times, the Indian education system is teetering on the brink of collapse simply because the necessary importance that should have been placed hasn’t been up to scratch. The funds’ allotment to spruce up the education infrastructure still continues to be abysmal despite the country making tremendous progress on the economic front. The public education sector has not lived up to expectations. In stark contrast, the private education sector is thriving despite encountering charges of high fees and unaffordability to the commoners.
PC:The Indian Express
- As such, when the government introduced the midday meal scheme in public schools, the idea was twofold. One, it is to ensure student dropout comes down drastically by serving hot meals thereby allowing the poor parents to send their wards to schools. Two, this will automatically ensure the admission percentage remains healthy as well as impart education which is so crucial for the development of the nation. Undoubtedly, midday meals help India and its quest. Therefore, governments should stop exploiting the women who make them. In a shocking revelation, when wages for a given work stay unchanged for 15 years, it signals that the work and worker have a beggarly low standing in the value chain.
PC:Mint
- The honorarium for cooks-cum-helpers (CCHs) in India’s midday meal programme was fixed at Rs. 1000 per month in 2009. Yes, you read it right. Most shockingly, it hasn’t moved an inch since. Honorarium expenditure is shared 60:40 between the Centre and states. When states choose not to enhance the pay-out, the Centre pays just Rs 600 for each CCH. The crazy thing is that these 15 years have also provided prodigious evidence of how much the midday meal scheme delivers on both the health and education fronts. How do we square the sterling work with the squalid treatment of the worker? Hiding behind the semantics of CCHs being honorary workers is untenable. The women must be properly paid. Women themselves will vouch for it.
PC:India.Com
- Mind you, an overwhelming majority of all these workers are women. If they weren’t no govt would write the bad fiction that they have come forward for rendering social services before paying them a pittance. As it is, women’s workforce participation in India is dominated by all the unpaid care work they do. For govts to exploit this perverse social scale instead of trying to reform it, is a comment on not only women’s equality but also India’s future. Intergenerational data has established that mothers with full midday meal exposure have much healthier children. This is also why courts regularly tick off pandemic-to-pollution controls for interrupting midday meals. Without much ado, govts should start giving them their fair dues.
