Don’t take away the children’s food!

The impoverished children of Char Kukri Mukri might not go back to school again. Like them, thousands of other children all over the country could well decide to stay at home.

There is a simple reason why these children will lose the appetite for education: they will no more have the free mid-day meals that till the end of last month they had been privy to. Poverty is always a brake on the future. And the future of these children is dependent on how well and how efficiently society --- and that includes the government and all of us who remain outside the corridors of authority --- is able to let them know that their schools will not just be places for them to partake of education but also be a guarantee of their physical well-being.

That physical well-being, dependent on protein-rich biscuits, indeed on the mid-day meals they have had so far, is now in jeopardy. We have had no explanation from the educational authorities why the mid-day meal programme is not being renewed. In a struggling society like ours, impoverished parents and guardians consider it a blessing when their children are provided with nourishing food by their schools. That provision does not now exist, unless of course those who care about the young, about their education, about the future of the nation exercise the wisdom of reassuring us that these children will indeed continue to be provided with lunch at school.

The pain comes in the knowledge that where India and Pakistan have maintained such mid-day, and cooked, meals for their children, we in Bangladesh have with a shocking degree of insensitivity decided that our children, unable to be fed by their emaciated and hungry parents, do not anymore require those lunches even as they pursue education. These children walk miles to school, knowing that a good lunch awaits them during recess. It was an idea which took shape soon after the liberation of Bangladesh, when despite its straitened circumstances the government went ahead with providing milk powder to children in a number of areas where poverty was rampant.

Things improved in phases. In the early 1990s, children from impoverished families were cheered by the provision of rice, pulses and even cash at school. The objective was palpable: poverty would not be an impediment to their education and school lunches would be an incentive to their not falling prey to the malaise of dropping out of school. In the years after 2000, the government went ahead with improving dietary measures for poor children in school. A decisive step was taken in 2010 when, with the cooperation of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the school-feeding programme clearly went for expansion. And, of course, between 2014 and 2021 the programme had increased substance added to it, with as many as fifty million children eventually coming under the coverage of the school lunch programme.

All of that is now under threat of being discontinued altogether. At a time when Covid-19 has been playing havoc with lives in the country, with people in the middle and poor classes rapidly finding themselves retrenched at work, with no food on the table at home, discontinuing the school lunch programme for the children of poor parents is morally unacceptable. The plan for meals of 'khichuri', part of a Tk 17,290 crore project, for impoverished school children was certainly an ambitious objective. It ought not to have been turned down. But if it had to be set aside, an alternative should have been suggested and adopted in order for these children to continue coming to classes.

In a country where the social security network remains fragile, the fact that between 2010 and 2021 children in fourteen upazilas were treated to cooked meals and children in other regions of the country could look forward to vitamin-enriched biscuits for lunch was an encouraging development. Why must such measures now be stopped without explanation and no one proffer any reason behind their suspension? Rasheda K. Chowdhury speaks for all of us when she finds it hard to believe that cooking meals for children in school will be an issue. Since when has feeding hungry children been an issue?

So what happens now that mid-day meals in schools have braked to a stop? One does not require an enormity of intelligence to understand the ramifications. Children will begin to stay away from school, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, they will find it arduous to walk all those miles to class. In the second, they cannot focus on their studies on hungry stomachs. And then comes a third factor, which is that parents who had thought part of their problems had been lifted off their shoulders by the school meals programme will now be exercised by worries of how to cope with the new situation. They might be tempted to send the boys out to work, as child labour. And the girls could begin to be looked upon as marriageable commodities. In the larger sense, the country loses.

Wise heads should make themselves relevant. And that they can do through a dispassionate observation of social conditions all of us are confronted with in these difficult times. Fathers have had their jobs terminated or their wages drastically reduced. Children, unable to carry on with their education, have taken to pulling rickshaws or engaging in other modes of work to keep their families going. School teachers have been sighted selling vegetables to households. Women who have worked as house help have not been encouraged to come back to work from fear of coronavirus contamination.

The secretary of the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education gives the country the disconcerting news that the government has no plan to resume the school feeding programme. Our question is simple: Why not? Citizens are regularly enlightened by news of a rise in GDP. That Bangladesh is poised to take a leap from LDC status to that of a middle-income nation is a reality we are proud of. That digital communication has been bringing the country together in one great unified enterprise is beyond question. Stimulus packages have gone out to industries in the face of the pandemic. Salaries of government servants have gone up. Despite the impediments put up by Covid-19, the garments sector and remittances from abroad have remained at a fairly good level.

But --- and here's the rub --- there is no money, or no willingness, to give these children of ultra-poor parents in the remote villages and chars of the country a simple meal of khichuri at their schools. At a time when these children need to be educated, to be healthy, to look to the future, to feel happy that the government of their country will give them the spartan meal they need to keep themselves going, inexplicable silence has descended around us.

It is not right that just as we have observed the half century mark of Bangladesh's sovereign existence as a nation, we have informed these poor children --- and they are all our children --- that they should not expect any more meals at school. It breaks the heart.