A hundred years of feeding children at school

There are few policies in India that five or six governments of different parties have each inherited, kept and enlarged. School meals in Tamil Nadu are one of them. This week's extension of the free breakfast scheme to Classes 6 to 8, which adds about 15.30 lakh children and brings the total to about 34.64 lakh pupils in 44,984 schools, is the newest link in a chain that is now more than a century long.

Where it began

The chain begins in Madras. In 1922, P. Theagaraya Chetty, a founder of the Justice Party and then president of the Corporation of Madras, started meals for poor children in selected city schools. The programme was stopped under the colonial administration in 1925 and restarted in 1927. M.C. Rajah, the leader of the then Depressed Classes, is also remembered as a pioneer of the idea. The argument these men made was simple and, at the time, radical: a hungry child cannot learn, and a State that wants an educated public must feed its pupils.

K. Kamaraj took the idea State-wide in 1956. M.G. Ramachandran turned it into the Nutritious Meal Programme in 1982. M. Karunanidhi added eggs in 1989. J. Jayalalithaa introduced variety meals in 2013. M.K. Stalin's government began the breakfast scheme for primary pupils in 2022. And the present government, led by C. Joseph Vijay, has now taken breakfast to Class 8 and named it after Kamaraj.

Each of them could have let the programme shrink quietly. None did. That continuity is a quiet achievement of Tamil Nadu's democracy, and it is worth saying so on a day when politics is usually described only as conflict.

Measure what matters

Continuity is not the same as quality. The State Planning Commission's early evaluation found attendance rising in most schools that served breakfast, more than in comparable nearby schools. That is encouraging, but attendance is only the first measure. With 57.8% of young children in the State found anaemic in the 2019–21 National Family Health Survey, the scheme should now be judged on nutrition and learning too.

The government should publish, every year and by district, independent data on what is served, how much of it is eaten, children's height, weight and haemoglobin, and learning outcomes in schools with and without the scheme's longer history. Cooks, most of them women from local self-help groups, should be paid on time and trained. Menus should respect local food habits and include protein every day, not only on special days.

A legacy is a duty

The Justice Party's founders would have recognised this week's announcement. They would also have asked the next question: what happens to the child after breakfast? Good teachers, safe buildings and textbooks in a language the child understands are the rest of the promise. The meal gets the child to the classroom. What happens there is the State's real test.