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E-Government, Education IT

Mobiles to monitor midday meal scheme soon

By Anshupriya Jha | 16 August 2011

In a bid to make the Midday Meal Scheme more effective, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has decided to soon launch a scheme to monitor the programme that serves 120 million children across the country.

A Midday Meal comprises free of cost lunch to all school going children on all working days and is provided by all government-run schools in India and is the largest school feeding programme in the world covering 1.265 million schools and other educational institutions supported under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All).

A majority of students enrolled in government schools in the country belong to economically disadvantaged families. The scheme thus protects students from hunger and prevents malnutrition besides increasing enrolment, ensuring attendance, developing social skills and bridging the caste divide as all children eat together.

It also empowers women by generating employment for them as cooks and cleaners.

Uttar Pradesh has been monitoring the scheme in more than 1.5 lakh schools across the State using Interactive Voice Response (IVR)-based phone calls since last year July. ‘Supercaller’, a solution developed by Knowlarity, generates phone calls between 10 a.m. ans 12 noon on each working day to schools in all 72 districts of the State. The system asks for the number of students served the meal on a given day and the teacher in charge of the Midday Meal Scheme answers by punching the number in a mobile phone.

The system has the capacity to send and receive data from 10,000 schools at a time. It sends the data to the central server in Delhi which is connected to the State’s Midday Meal authority. Officials entrusted with the scheme’s responsibility can check the data anytime and can do a surprise check at any school to validate the same. It also helps in plugging corruption and taking action to plug the loopholes such as tracking the purchase and supply of raw material to a school.

The HRD has now decided to replicate the success and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has already developed an IVRS to be used across other States in the country. The system will ensure that the scheme is properly monitored in inaccessible areas.

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