Bhopal: Currently, in Madhya Pradesh, providing mid-day meals during the school break has created controversy in leadership. Once the event was exposed, it received senior investigators’ attention to record it. In a recently implemented action, authorities finally pulled the trigger and issued show-cause notices to the teachers.
The officials from the mid-day meal allocation department said the reports were recorded by the teachers by mistake. It has taken a while, but the department stated that no mid-day meals had been intended to be delivered during summer holidays in government schools. But one major economic scam relating to mid-day meal supply, was recently unearthed in 23 state districts. This issue was for the first time highlighted in the recent past by Congress leader and former Union Minister Arun Yadav.
It has now extended further to over 49,000 government schools. This was a grandiose fraud vested at a state level but the central government came to know it and directed the state government to initiate an inquiry immediately and take suitable action against the defaulters.
Summer vacation has started in most of the states of India since May 1 and the schools will reopen after June 15 in Madhya Pradesh. This observation was made to understand the situation, and it was observed that, during this holiday period, meals were officially documented as delivered on both paper and through the online portal. To cover these defects, entries were made for dates outside the vacation period.
The mid-day meal data is recorded using the auto-monitoring system of the Prime Minister’s integrated Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM POSHAN) program. They are paid under a modality where five rupees is paid for each primary school child and seven rupees for each secondary school child. This task is usually carried out by different units across the organization. Some other districts highlighted in the survey included Indore, Jabalpur, and Gwalior, while the state capital, Bhopal, was not exempted either.