Doorstep delivery of MDM ration: No takers for tender

Ranchi: No bids have been received yet for the tender issued by the district education department for the doorstep delivery of food grains, an initiative of the state school education and literacy department to distribute midday meal (MDM) rice directly to school campuses. The tender was issued on December 21 and the deadline for submitting the bids is March 16.
Under the new initiative, the ration for the MDM is to be delivered to the schools across the district beginning January 1 to relieve the teachers from non-teaching work.
Kameshwar Singh, the MDM district nodal officer, said, “The process for the doorstep delivery will be simplified for teachers. Through this initiative, they will receive some relief from non-teaching duties. The rice will be delivered to the schools from the next quarter. Blocks in the district will be responsible for the distribution. The MDM rice was not distributed in January, which falls in the previous fiscal year, despite issuing the tender as we did not receive any bids. Similarly, tenders were called for the next fiscal year but no bids have been received yet.”
He added, “We don’t know why there are no applications yet. But we will extend the last date till the bids arrive. If no bid is made or none is accepted, the ration delivery will proceed in the same process as before.”
The tender was floated under the state food corporation for the appointment of block-wise transport-cum-handling agents to deliver the food grains from the godowns to schools from the new financial year. The sealed tenders are to be received at the office of the district superintendent of education for Ranchi. The 20 blocks of the district are divided into six zones according to distance and set to benefit 2,128 schools.
Earlier, the Sanchalan Samiti (Sanyojika) and the teachers were responsible for collecting their quota of rice from the block office on a quarterly basis.
District education officer Akash Kumar said, “We have begun the initiative of delivering ration, specifically rice of the MDM, under a pilot project in the Mandar block. We found this to be effective and so we decided to implement it across all districts. The initiative will go into effect in the new session.”