Stalin speaks in the Tamil Nadu Assembly on Saturday. (Twitter/@CMOTamilnadu)Tamil Nadu is set to become the first state in the country to offer breakfast in government schools, along with the mid-day meal. Chief Minister MK Stalin on Saturday marked the completion of his first year in power with the announcement of five schemes, including a breakfast scheme for students studying in Classes 1 to 5 in the state.
The special nutritional scheme is based on a public health study by the government on the alarming trends of malnourished children in the state.
“There was a government study that showed that many children who start early were skipping breakfast. They mostly miss breakfast not only for the distance they have to travel but also for the misery and difficulties at home. So we are launching this, for students up to Class 5, in a selected number of schools – in corporations, municipalities and rural areas – before making it a statewide scheme,” Stalin said on Saturday.
Similarly, referring to studies of unhealthy, underweight children in the state, Stalin said the nutritional scheme being announced by the government is to “ensure that all children in Tamil Nadu are not malnourished.”
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Tamil Nadu is the first state to offer breakfast along with midday meals even as the union government has dithered on implementing a similar recommendation in the new National Education Policy (NEP) that was released by the Centre in July 2020.
The NEP strongly backs the breakfast at school proposal stating, “Children are unable to learn optimally when they are undernourished or unwell. Hence, the nutrition and health (including mental health) of children will be addressed, through healthy meals and the introduction of well-trained social workers, counsellors, and community involvement into the schooling system.”
“Furthermore, research shows that the morning hours after a nutritious breakfast can be particularly productive for the study of cognitively more demanding subjects and hence these hours may be leveraged by providing a simple but energizing breakfast in addition to mid-day meals,” the NEP adds.
However, even after almost two years, the Centre hasn’t launched breakfast at schools. The Ministry of Education had worked on a proposal last year but, according to sources, it was shelved due to a funds crunch.
Tamil Nadu was the pioneer of the midday meal scheme as the first initiative to provide meals to children had been taken by the erstwhile Madras Municipal Corporation around 1920. In post-Independence India, Tamil Nadu was again the pioneer, with Chief Minister K Kamaraj rolling out a school feeding scheme in 1956. This scheme was later emulated by the union government in the shape of what’s today known as the midday meal scheme.
Apart from the breakfast programme, on Saturday Stalin also announced a new school of excellence programme, modelled on a similar project by the Delhi government. This scheme will also be implemented in all corporations in the state at the cost of Rs 150 crore to modernise the infrastructure and invent a new learning environment for school students.
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