A lesson from the mid-day meal tragedy

The one thing I can’t get out of my head about Chhapra is pictures of those graves. In the Delhi newsroom, as we monitored the transmission of images, I had to grab a pair of headphones to listen again, and again, to check whether what I thought I heard was really true. My colleague Manish Kumar was narrating how outside classrooms still scattered with their books and desks, the bodies of 20 children had been buried. The children, who would have at some point or another looked outside with yearning, looked forward to lunchtime perhaps or playtime, were now lying poisoned and buried in that very school ground.

It’s an idea that is incomprehensible but their anger wasn’t. These parents had shouted so many times about the food, they’d complained so many times about the stink emanating from it, they’d pointed out so many things that had gone wrong with the entire education system and no one bothered to listen. So when their children died and the news cameras came rushing in from not just Patna, three hours away, but all the way from Lucknow and Delhi, the parents buried the bodies of their children right outside the classrooms so that in death, they couldn’t be ignored.

As I thought about this, I remembered the efforts of activist-lawyer Ashok Aggarwal who has spent all his time petitioning the Delhi High Court, the chief minister about the state of government schools in Delhi. He befriended reporters like me to push his cause and when we’d express inability to go to godforsaken areas like Narela, he’d spend his weekend driving us around. On those trips, as someone writing on education, I remember hearing the occasional horror story of pests in midday meals, but the general sentiment always seemed happy.

The kids would talk about the chole-chawal they liked, the bread that they didn’t like, and of cooking skills that varied. In Haryana, I remember walking into a school where teachers would take time out to cook the day’s meal. It was a difficult toss-up between feeding mouths and feeding minds, but parents didn’t care as long as their children got one proper meal a day.

Our housekeeper, Gauri, tells us that in Balasore, Orissa, the children love their midday meal menus. They get dalma, which is a lentil-based vegetable dish, soyabean and their favourite, egg curry. Apparently, the egg curry-rice combination is so popular, it’s been made a twice-a-week dish just three months ago. Even though the government is stingy about oil and onions, Gauri says the children definitely fill their tummies and parents feel it’s worth their while.

But obviously, the only reason why it works in that area is because someone is listening — they have figured out that children like egg, and they figured out a way to increase the supply of this invaluable source of protein. In Chhapra, however, no one seemed to be listening, to the children, to their worried parents and to all the warning signals like the discoloured oil coming in from a dodgy supplier.

You’d think that those parents and children were neglected because they were in far-flung Chhapra which didn’t even have the medical facilities to counter food-poisoning in kids, which is why many lost their lives while being taken to Patna for medical treatment. The truth is that such alarm bells keep going off in pockets across the national capital and right under all our noses. I realized that in his Facebook account, Aggarwal has an album titled ‘Right to Education’ where he has put up postcards children send him to tell him what’s wrong with their schools.

I read them as I thought about those Chhapra mothers whose cries were only heard when it was too late. Girls writing in about toilets with no water, about boys writing  filthy things on walls that no one bothered to erase, about fans being there but not working, and about the filth surrounding them. In a letter to the Chief Justice of India, some children wrote about how they’d go hungry sometimes because the midday meal that was brought in wasn’t enough. They wrote about how they were told to have two portions of the meal the next day, and if they protested, how some were beaten or told off.

Those letters, those pictures, those petitions mostly go unanswered, unheeded and unseen by those in charge of fixing these things. Politicians love to land up to allocate blame when things go horribly wrong — but wouldn’t it be great if they just started visiting them as part of their daily routine? Call it a campaign to catch young voters by wooing them over midday meals? If the neta doesn’t know which school or initiative in his area needs help, they should just give their local Ashok a call, I’m sure they’d be glad to show them around

 Sunetra  Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News.