IIM Ahmedabad suggests hazard analysis for mid-day meal scheme

Sample this: 7% of Gujarat's population resides in Ahmedabad. The city is running the mid-day meal scheme.

The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is responsible for implementation of the scheme in the city. AMC covers 563 schools under 61 MDM centres. It caters to 1.2 million beneficiaries which is about one-third of the total number in Gujarat.

In the year 2005-06, about Rs28 million were spent on the scheme. Rs1,400 crore were spent on the MDM scheme in the year 2007-08.

These lines taken up from the research paper made by IIMA professors on the MDM scheme raise a serious concern. Their worry is that even after spending so much money, school children from poor families are not able to get the supplementary food which they are entitled to under the scheme.

Four IIMA professors - Satish Deodhar, Sweta Mahandiratta, KV Ramani, and Dileep Mavalankar and Sandip Ghosh and Vincent Braganza from St Xavier's College suggested that the food provided to the lacks nutrition and does not provide adequate protein and iodine and does not fulfill requirement of a MDM scheme.

After coming to the conclusion that implementing food stamps systems might not work in India as it has in the US, the researchers have suggested that food quality systems such as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) should be introduced to check on food delivery.

It involves a system of identifying hazards, doing assessment of chances of occurrence of hazards during each phase, procuring raw materials, manufacturing and distributing, and in defining the measures of hazard control. Another paper on MDM - Understanding Critical Issues with reference to Ahmedabad city, by the same professors, inspects the possibility of implementing HACCP.

The paper states: "To increase efficiency and quality of the prepared meal service, the scheme, operated either by the government itself or by a contracted private parties, has to have a formal food quality management system in place. An accepted system called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) would have to be implemented for this purpose. Such system needs to be audited periodically by an external certifying agency."

This generates an incentive for the food service provider to maintain quality in all its operations. "Although generating HACCP system for food service operation like MDM scheme will be a separate project in itself (which private consultants do regularly), what one needs to do is chalk out a process flow chart and identify critical control points of the system and generate documentation. Below is a succinct flow chart of the MDM scheme operation at school level and the Critical Control Points (CCP) decision (Figure 3.4). Once the flow chart is ready, one has to prepare a CCP documentation described," read the paper. 

This generates an incentive for the food service provider to maintain quality in all its operations.

"Although generating HACCP system for food service operation like the MDM scheme will be a separate project in itself (which private consultants do regularly), what one needs is to chalk out process flow chart and identify critical control points of the system and generate documentation. Below, we provide a succinct flow chart of the MDM scheme operation at school level and the Critical Control Points decision (Figure 3.4). Once the flow chart is ready, one has to prepare a Critical Control Points (CCP) documentation described," said the paper.