The central government last week ruled in favour of hot cooked meals as the final choice of food to be served to pre-school children under the Rs 42,000-crore Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).
The Cabinet decision overruled a note of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) and the recommendations of the Department of Women and Child Development last week. It also upheld a Supreme Court order that hot cooked meals be served to the pre-school children.
The Cabinet committee directed that “arrangements be made for serving hot cooked meals in all anganwadis/mini anganwadis under the ICDS scheme in the next two years”.
It demanded that panchayati raj institutions be involved in implementing the scheme, including providing land and buildings for the centres.
The committee also decided that a Group of Ministers (GoM) would be constituted to recommend measures to facilitate the shift to hot cooked meals in consultation with state governments. The GoM is supposed to finalise its recommendations in three months.
Hot cooked food is served exclusively in 15 states, while ready-to-eat meals are served in three. A combination of the two is served in 11 states.
The Cabinet decision of October 16 has received an approval from food right groups that have been lobbying for hot cooked meals in the anganwadis.
The CCEA had proposed that state governments should finalise the choice of food and had expressed reaservations about the safety of providing cooked food without clean rooms and hygienic conditions.
The matter has been a bone of contention between the lobby backing the pre-cooked food industry, supported by Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chaudhury, and another view supported by the Supreme Court and endorsed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen that hot cooked meals should be served to children below six years in anganwadis.
Chaudhury has been supporting ready-to-eat food in spite of opposition from NGOs, the court, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Planning Commission.
“The government has finally decided that children would get only hot cooked meals. A decision to the contrary would have been contempt of court,” said Biraj Patnaik of the Right to Food campaign.
The ICDS, which has an annual budget of Rs 6,000 crore, got an increased outlay for the 11th Plan taking it to Rs 42,000 crore for the five-year period.
There are over one million anganwadis in the country that cover 55 million children. The cost of each child’s meal has been doubled from Rs 2 to Rs 4 and about half of the ICDS budget goes towards food bills.
The Right to Food Campaign, an advocacy group started by activists like Jean Dreze, Kavita Srivastava and Biraj Patnaik, which has been monitoring the working of ICDS on the orders of the Supreme Court, had condemned the CCEA recommendation saying it was contempt of court. One of the commissioners appointed by the apex court on the ICDS NC Saxena said that he was always in favour of cooked food and the government’s decision echoes the court stand.
