It’s a little past 8 in the morning as children begin trickling into the Chennai Urdu Government Primary School (CUGPS) on Arthoon Road in North Madras’s Royapuram area. Plates, tumblers, hot wheat kichadi, and sambar await them in neat rows inside a small classroom. Some are still rubbing the sleep from their eyes while many others are excited to sit down to a meal with their friends and classmates. These children, from Classes 1 to 5, are being provided their morning meal under the Chief Minister’s Breakfast Scheme, launched by the MK Stalin-led Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government. TNM visited two such schools in Chennai and found that the scheme appears to have made a considerable difference to the students’ quality of life.
Amid the chaos of children running to morning assembly after breakfast and the meals being served efficiently, the principal of CUGPS, Akther Begum, speaks to TNM. “The scheme was first started at our school on September 16, 2022. It’s been nearly a year since then. Before the scheme was launched, we’d observed that many students would come to school late or looking dull and fatigued from not having had breakfast. Many of these students are also from low-income, daily-wage-earning families. The scheme has resulted in an improvement in the students’ health. They’re in school by 8.30 am. They’re able to pay better attention in class.” As per records, 208 students are served breakfast daily at CUPGS.
At the Chennai Primary School Vanniya on Eldams Road, principal Ramamaheshwari echoes similar sentiments. “Students used to come in late. We also struggled with a lot of absenteeism. Now, late coming has drastically reduced, with students coming in well in time for breakfast. As the menu keeps changing every day, it also keeps them interested in the food.” Here, over 200 students are provided breakfast daily from the centralised kitchen in Mylapore which also cooks for 13 other schools in neighbouring areas.
Bharathi, a Bloc Resource Teacher Educator (BRTE) – a representative from the Samagra Shiksha scheme, was incidentally present at the Eldams Road school for a surprise spot check. “Most of the parents are daily-wage earners and are not able to feed the children in the mornings. They either can’t afford or don’t have time because they have to get to work. Often, a student’s last meal would be dinner the previous night. Before the breakfast scheme was launched, their next meal would only be the mid-day meals served in schools. Many times, teachers used to buy biscuits and tea from their own pockets for students who’d come without breakfast.”
The Chief Minister’s Breakfast Scheme was announced in May 2022 and was to be initially rolled out in 1,543 government primary schools – classes 1 to 5 – at a budget of Rs 33.56 crore (Rs 12.75 per child, per day). The scheme was launched in September of the same year with the inauguration in Madurai. In March 2023, then Finance Minister Palanivel Thiyagarajan announced during his Budget speech that the scheme would be extended to all 30,122 government primary schools across the state at a budget of Rs 500 crore for the year.
Tamil Nadu already has a mid-day meal programme for students of all government schools, where lunch is provided. The scheme has been in place since 1956. But unlike mid-day meals, which are cooked on campus, the breakfast scheme meals are cooked in centralised kitchens. With both breakfast and mid-day meals being provided, primary school students now are ensured at least two meals a day.
TNM visited a kitchen in Royapuram that provides breakfast to the CUPGS nearby and 10 other schools in the neighbouring areas. Cooking begins around 4.30 am. Large pots of sambar and kichadi are bubbling away until they’re neatly packed into heat-resistant containers. By 7 am, the work of loading the food containers onto delivery trucks starts. Once the food is loaded and the truck doors are locked, a photo is taken and uploaded to a specialised state government-run app for monitoring the daily implementation of the scheme. The app allows live tracking of the truck.
As principal Ramamaheshwari pointed out, the meals keep changing. The Royapuram centralised kitchen’s food menu for the month shows a variety of dishes scheduled date-wise. Meals such as rice upma, venn pongal, semiya upma, maize kichadi, wheat and rava upma, rava kichadi, and more are served on a rotational basis with a side of sambar. A breakdown of how many grams per head of rice, cereals, spices, salt, etc., has to be provided is also issued to the schools.
By 7.10 am, the food had reached CUPGS. “The truck doors are locked and opened only once it reaches each school. A copy of the keys is with the school principals who come and open up the truck and oversee the unloading of the containers. By 8 am onwards, students start trickling in, though most arrive by 8.30 am,” says the principal. “By about 9.30, we’re done serving breakfast and it’s time for assembly. We have to upload a photo every day of the meal in progress onto the app. If we fail to upload the picture even one day, we get calls from higher authorities asking for an explanation.”
Parents whom TNM spoke to also shared positive feedback. “In the mornings they provide healthy food like wheat pongal or maize kichadi. Otherwise, I have to wake up early and cook for my children and send off my husband to work, so this scheme is very useful,” says Safia Nazeem, whose child studies at CUPGS.
Another parent, Samitha, shares similar thoughts. “Last year, my husband had an accident and was bedridden. It became extremely hectic for me between having to look after him, getting the children ready for school, feeding them, and overseeing their studies. The breakfast scheme was launched at that time. All I had to do was get the children ready and drop them at the school. The food is nutritious, they eat well, and are able to concentrate on their studies.”
A parent at the Eldams Road school who is also on the school committee and helps serve breakfast daily adds that his son eats better at the school than he does at home. “Here, as he sees other children already eating together, he eats without any fuss,” the parent told TNM.
History of school meal schemes in Tamil Nadu
The breakfast scheme, as mentioned earlier, is an addition to the existing mid-day meal programme in the state. As former IAS officer S Narayan notes in his book Dravidian Years: Politics and Welfare in Tamil Nadu, then chief minister K Kamaraj introduced the noon meal scheme, a first in India, in 1956 when he served as chief minister. The story of how the scheme came to be implemented goes that Kamaraj ran into a young boy in Tirunelveli district who was herding cattle. When asked why the boy was not in school, he is reported to have said that he’d go if he was provided food and thus the mid-day meal scheme was born.
Narayan in his book also highlights that the scheme served 8,000 schools, providing lunch to 2 lakh children. Initially, the scheme was funded through voluntary donations from local communities. However, within the year, the state government issued funds of Rs 0.06 per head in addition to the Rs 0.02 per head from local bodies and Rs 0.02 from local donations.
In 1961, Narayan adds, the US government-funded NGO Co-operative for Relief Everywhere (CARE) sponsored commodity assistance by providing bulgar wheat which was used to expand the noon meal programme to 16 lakh children. Additionally, in 1967 CARE helped set up centralised kitchens to relieve school teachers of the work of cooking the meals.
The introduction of the mid-day meal programme is credited with a rise in school enrollment among rural children from poor families who were otherwise forced to work to supplement their household incomes. That at least one meal was taken care of by the state government led to more children beginning to attend school.
However, it must be noted that the serving of mid-day meals predates the government schemes launched in Independent India. The first mid-day meal was served at a corporation school in Chennai’s Thousand Lights, thanks to the Justice Party, an ideological predecessor of the DMK. P Theagaraya Chetty, who was the president of the Madras Corporation from 1919 to 1923, is credited with introducing mid-day meals in Chennai.
The subsequent state governments would expand upon the scheme, despite political differences. 1982 would witness the MGR-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) launch the Chief Minister’s Nutritious Meal Programme. The MGR government expanded the programme to all primary schools in the state, while earlier the scheme only served rural primary schools. At the time, Prabhu Chawla observed in India Today, “The scheme is probably the shrewdest political move of the durable matinee idol’s career, combining as it does social benefit with political profit. At each of the feeding centres, the people in charge of the feeding do not fail to remind the children that the food is a gift from MGR...”
After the DMK came to power in early 1989, the scheme was further expanded and renamed the Tamil Nadu Government’s Nutritious Noon Meal Programme. M Karunanidhi, the chief minister at the time, introduced eggs to the menu on a fortnightly basis. In the mid-2000s, when the AIADMK was in power led by J Jayalalithaa, the meal would be rebranded as the Puratchi Thalaivar MGR Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme. Jayalalithaa also introduced a variety of meals in the menu alongside masala eggs at the time.
As much as this history speaks to a progressive approach to child welfare and school enrollment, the scheme has also repeatedly been hit with allegations of misappropriation of commodities and funds and casteism over the decades. Cases of children, due to parental pressure, refusing to eat food prepared by Dalit cooks have been rampant in the state as well as in other parts of the country where similar schemes have been implemented.
The newly launched breakfast scheme has already become another site of casteism within a year of its launch. Earlier this week, a school in the Karur district of Tamil Nadu came under fire after half the students of the Panchayat Union Primary School in Velanchettiyur village did not eat breakfast as the food was prepared by a cook from the Arunthathiyar community (categorised as Scheduled Caste). The children from the families that carried out the casteist practice of refusing food made by a Dalit person hailed from various Most Backward Class (MBC) and Other Backward Class (OBC) communities. On September 5, Karur District Collector Prabhushankar visited the school and in a symbolic gesture of solidarity had his breakfast there. He also warned parents of the consequences if they continued to discriminate against the government-appointed cook.
Read: Tamil Nadu students refuse to eat breakfast prepared by Dalit cook, District Collector intervenes