SMS monitoring of midday meal: Why it will not end Odisha's horrors

By Sandeep Sahu

At a surface level, the idea looks unexceptionable. The operation of the mid day meal (MDM) scheme in nearly 70,000 schools in Odisha would be monitored in real time through an SMS based mechanism in a phased manner. But scratch a little deeper and the great new idea does not quite look like it would put an end to the horrendous happenings on the MDM front that are being reported from schools across the state.

The project, to be facilitated through the SMS gateway of Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC), a state government undertaking, would require headmasters of all schools in the state to send SMSes on a daily basis on the number of students who eat mid day meals, the menu and the like.

A specially developed software will automatically filter out anomalies in the information provided by the principals and generate an automated report, officials involved with the project say. If the headmaster of a school sends false reports for three days consecutively, an automated report will be sent for evaluation directly to the Director, School and Mass Education department.

While this would certainly be a big improvement on the earlier system of monthly reporting, there is no way it can keep tabs on things that have a critical bearing on the incident-free running of the scheme: grossly unhygienic conditions in which food is cooked and served; rotten, fungus-infected food being served to children; every conceivable insect from lizards to snakes falling into meals and - hold your breath - children themselves falling into cooking cauldrons and dying!

On August 24, Banita Kanhar, a tribal class III girl student of Girishchandrapur sevasharm school in Sambalpur district fell into a pot containing piping hot egg curry served as Saturday special to students, sustained 70% burns and died in the SCB medical college in Cuttack the next day. As if to prove that it was not a rare, one-off incident, a class II student in a school in Balangir district got severely burnt after falling into a large pot containing water strained from cooked rice barely five days later. In the month and half since 23 school children were killed after consuming a meal turned poisonous in Saran district of Bihar, there have been at least 10 incidents in Odisha of students being taken ill and hospitalised after eating food stuff contaminated by insects or use of spurious material.

These are the kind of things that the government needs to keep tabs on - and not whether ‘ghost’ children eat mid day meals and if headmasters make money while running the MDM scheme as the SMS based monitoring seeks to do. “In due course, we will develop a mechanism for these things too. But a beginning has to be made somewhere,” explains an official closely involved with the project involving monitoring of MDM through SMS. But pressed a little further, the official conceded that even in its fully developed form, the system cannot prevent an incident like the one at Harishchandrapur village.

There are other imponderables as well. Given the state of mobile networks in rural Odisha, how foolproof can an SMS based monitoring system be? “In case of such a problem, the headmaster can always get in touch with the block office where there are data entry operators, who can pass on the information to the monitoring centre in Bhubaneswar through the internet,” the official quoted above, who would rather not be named, offers by way of a solution. But sceptics point out that internet connections at the block level are perhaps in an even more dismal state than the mobile networks.

In any case, generation of data, in itself, amounts to precious little if it is not acted upon, points out Tapan Padhi, a Bhubaneswar based activist. “Who is to ensure that it is acted upon and who is to be held accountable if it is not acted upon?” asks Padhi.

Teachers are seething at the new initiative, which would add one more burden on their already overburdened shoulders. “To file this kind of information, the headmaster not only has to do a head count of the students while they are having their meal on a daily basis, but also supervise the entire process from the handing over of the ration to the serving of the meal. If that is what the government wants us to do, it might as well free us of all our other responsibilities, including the minor one of teaching,” says the headmaster of a school in Bhubaneswar. His solution: a variant of the direct cash transfer scheme whereby parents of school children are given money for their children’s meal in place of the current system of serving cooked meals in the school.

All available indications from the ground suggest that what the headmaster in Bhubaneswar says echoes the views of the overwhelming majority of teachers across the state. The government would do well to heed their opinion in the matter. While gadget based fancy schemes are all very well, they cannot go very far if accountability is sought to be fixed only on the teachers.