India’s Free School Lunch Program – 140 Million Kids Served Daily

Here’s an optimistic story that hasn’t been reported much. Many industrialised countries have school lunch programs, providing children with a free lunch every schoolday. Sometimes it can be problematic getting the political commitment since these programs are supposed to be costly. Also given the recent change in US polical discourse, who but a socialist communist Muslim Nazi would dare steal “our” hard-earned taxpaying dollars for the mere purpose of feeding children?

In 2001, the Supreme Court of India ruled that each of India’s 28 states (and possibly the 7 territories) must provide all primary schoolchildren with this fabled free-lunch-at-every-schoolday. What’s that? I hear you say. A third world country with massive poverty and malnutrition? The most prominent non-African country in terms of “poverty porn”? Indeed. The distinction between 1st and 3rd world countries is an outdated concept that made more sense in the 1950s — see my old post on this. And although India more starving and malnourished people than any country on earth, that’s largely because of its size. It’s been making tremendous strides and the lunch program is a great sign of this. Here be the 15 min current affairs story on it:

[Video link]

The program is enormous — every day, 140 million children get a free lunch. As I always say, our mind finds it hard to interpret such numbers so let’s try this again. Every day, 140,000,000 children get a free lunch. Some schools run their own cooking. Others participate in centralised programs. The news story covers some run by none other than the Hare Krishnas. Enormous quantities of rice, lentils, spices and so on are cooked in vertical vats, poured into metal barrels and driven round the country.

The meals are a true blessing. Many kids would otherwise be hungry and unable to concentrate on schoolwork. This has a knockon effect on student performance and then the economy, poverty and development. Some kids are from such poor families that this is the only full hot meal they get every day, having to beg their dinner. School attendance has skyrocketed — a free lunch means tens of millions of children can now go to school without having to work extra hours to earn their lunch.

Finally, the meals can also be an instrument of social change: it seems that there are quotas for Dalit (ie. “untouchable” caste) workers amongst the cooks. Meaning that children get used to eating food prepared by a Dalit and thereby get a kickstart in overcoming one of the most pernicious and vile hierarchies in history. Oh, and also as someone who loves Indian food the meals themselves look delicious.

Amongst the concepts in Judaism I make fun of there is one I like. The word for charity is tzedakah which means righteousness or justice. A person is not considered to “be charitable” but rather to give what’s due. I got reminded of this while watching the video — one person made a similar point that this is not charity but justice (I think that’s how it was mentioned). We should feel no more charitable for providing the school lunch as we should feel charitable for not convicting innocent people of crimes, both are basic justice. Also even in the pure economics of it, I think these meals probably provide a greater return on investment for India as a country than almost any other similar spending.

And how does the country where you live (probably a wealthy industrialised democracy) compare to India here?