Food for thought

Aadhaar card for mid-day meals is not a great idea

A recent notification by the ministry of human resource development making the Aadhaar card mandatory for school-going children to avail of the mid-day meals (MDM) served in government schools has justifiably created a furore. Several activists and civil-society members reacted sharply, condemning this new demand, which, on the face of it, was done to enforce greater accountability in the implementation of the scheme. The scheme is the world’s biggest school-lunch programme, wherein children studying in Classes I to VIII are served one hot cooked meal on working days, and during summer vacations in drought-affected areas. The scheme has been in play for the past 13 years and more than 102 million children were served meals in 2015-16. It has two key objectives. The first is improving the nutritional outcomes of school-going children. The levels of malnutrition in the country, especially of children, are still unacceptably high and many researchers and academics favouring a government intervention like MDM are of the view that such measures have played a crucial role in improving the nutritional standards over the past decade. The second reason, of course, is to improve school attendance. Looking back, India has made improvements as regards school enrolment and, to a lesser extent, dropout rates. The latest notification is seen militating against both these objectives.

Critics quickly put the government in a corner by suggesting that it would, in effect, deny a large number of children their first important meal because they do not have an Aadhaar card. It is a fact that most kids don’t have one. Under fire from various quarters, the government on March 7 tried to allay such concerns when it clarified that no child would be denied the meal provided she or he could show a valid identification.

It is not hard to see what the government’s possible intention is: Most subsidy schemes in India suffer from massive leakages and over time there has been a growing consensus that the government should move out of providing complex subsidy schemes and instead simply give cash to the intended beneficiaries. But this argument works best in cases where the actual benefit is monetary in nature such as scholarships and pension schemes. Instead of going through a labyrinth of government officials in central, state and district offices, cash equal to the benefit intended can be pushed to the person’s Aadhaar-linked bank account. This logic can also work for subsidies on other commodities such as LPG cylinders or the monthly quota of foodgrain or fertilisers.

However, improving nutritional standards is a far more difficult policy goal than any of the other examples. The latest National Family Health Survey shows that despite an increasing number of central and state-level schemes focusing on improving nutrition, the proportion of children suffering from wasting (weight-for-height) and severe wasting has gone up in the past decade. This is then no time to pull back from such schemes. Moreover, the ground reality is that the leakage in the MDM scheme happens before the food is served. Children flashing their Aadhaar card will not address that. All of this is not to mention the legal point on which this notification is out of order: In a series of orders, the Supreme Court has ruled that Aadhaar cannot be made compulsory for any services to which people were otherwise entitled.