No free lunch, say mid-day meal contractors

Poor T Students Bear The Brunt, As Contractors Stop The Scheme Over Unpaid Govt Dues .While the beneficiaries of Re1-a-kg rice scheme are crying foul over the supply of substandard/rotten rice, government schools in Telangana region are desperately seeking rice for the mid-day meals scheme, the implementation of which has gone for a toss in the last 10 days.
With the rice required for the mid-day meals not being supplied to the schools, the students, mostly belonging to scheduled tribes and castes, have stopped attending classes. The situation has turned from bad to worse, with contractors in government upper primary schools locking the kitchens due to non-payment of food bills to them. “The government has not cleared the bills and hence we have stopped lifting the rice stocks. How can we prepare food for nearly 300 students when our payments have not been made in the last 45 days,” pointed out a midday meal caretaker in Mallaypalli primary school in Utkoor mandal of Mahbubnagar district.
Sources said a majority of the schools in the backward Mahbubnagar, Medak, Nalgonda and Adilabad districts are facing the same predicament. Not only primary and upper primary schools, even high schools are hit by the rice paucity leading to discontinuation of the mid-day meals scheme. Madavath Gopal, a standard VII student of Pattigadda thanda in Keshampet mandal, told TOI that the government high school has not made alternative arrangements to supply food for them. “We were forced to go without food for the last seven days. Why should the poor students be deprived of this facility?” he sought to know.

District education officer (DEO) of Rangareddy, P Srihari agreed that the bills to contractors could not be cleared because of the recent Sakala Janula Samme. “Nearly 800 tonnes of rice is supplied to schools every month, but the contractors have not taken the rice, over non-payment of bills,” he told TOI.Sources said some of the contractors have colluded with fair-price shop dealers to supply the rice meant for the mid-day meals to Public Distribution System (PDS) shops where the Re1-a-kg rice scheme implementation is causing much furore. “We have ordered an inquiry into these allegations. It is unfortunate that some of the contractors are supplying the mid-day meal rice to PDS dealers,” Medak DEO Jagadishwar said. Lakhs of students in 3,030 government schools in Medak district were affected because of failure of the authorities to serve food in the afternoon.
    In some areas, the school headmasters, in collusion with contractors, manipulate the attendance sheet of students at the mid-day meals. “They cook food for only a few students, but claims that all the students were fed. Inflated bills are shown, thereby causing a loss to the state exchequer,” said a high school headmaster in Nalgonda district, on condition of anonymity.Simhachalam, a mid-day meal organiser, at Narayanpet mandal lamented that the scheme pushed him into a debt trap. “I borrowed over Rs30,000 to feed schoolchildren. But the government has not settled bills from September this year,” he said.