Mid-Day Meal Scheme

Midday Meal Scheme
Primary school children receiving Midday Meal in Karnataka
Country	India
Launched	1995
Status	Active

The Midday Meal Scheme is a school meal programme of the Government of India designed to improve the nutritional status of school-age children nationwide. The programme supplies free lunches on working days for children in primary and upper primary classes in government, government aided, local body, Education Guarantee Scheme, and alternate innovative education centres, Madarsa and Maqtabs supported under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and National Child Labour Project schools run by the ministry of labour. Serving 120,000,000 children in over 1,265,000 schools and Education Guarantee Scheme centres, it is the largest such programme in the world.

Under article 24, paragraph 2c of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which India is a party, India has committed to providing "adequate nutritious foods" for children. The programme has undergone many changes since its launch in 1995. The Midday Meal Scheme is covered by the National Food Security Act, 2013. The legal backing to the Indian school meal programme is similar to the legal backing provided in the US through the National School Lunch Act.

The roots of the programme can be traced back to the pre-independence era, when a mid day meal programme was introduced in 1925 in Madras Corporation by the British administration. A mid day meal programme was introduced in the Union Territory of Puducherry by the French administration in 1930.

Initiatives by state governments to children began with their launch of a mid day meal programme in primary schools in the 1962–63 school year. Tamil Nadu is a pioneer in introducing mid day meal programmes in India to increase the number of kids coming to school; Thiru K. Kamaraj, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, introduced it first in Chennai and later extended it to all districts of Tamil Nadu.

During 1982, July 1 onwards, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Thiru. M. G. Ramachandran upgraded the existing Mid-day meal scheme in the state to 'Nutritious food scheme' keeping in the mind that 68 lakh children suffer malnutrition.