After casting inspection glare on housing, employment and infrastructure sectors in rural Bengal, it’s time for students’ mid-day meal to come under central scanner in the run-up to the Panchayat polls.
Barely a week after Bengal Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari wrote to Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan urging him to send a central audit team to probe “PM Poshan (mid-day meal) scam in West Bengal” where he alleged large-scale “misappropriation of mid-day meal funds”, the Centre seems to have obliged by deciding to send a team to inspect the implementation of the scheme.
In a communication to the state government on Friday, the Union education ministry conveyed that a team of nutrition specialists and central government officers would be visiting the state to take stock of 16 aspects of the implementation of PM Poshan scheme.
The Centre has also requested state government officers to become a part of the team so that the audit could be jointly conducted. Sources revealed that the central team is likely to visit the state sometime during the end of January, this year.
The cost of mid-day meals for the 11.6 million students of Bengal is shared by the Centre and state on a 60:40 basis.
Ironically, the PM Poshan inspection comes at a time when the state has recently notified that it would add chicken and seasonal fruits once weekly to the existing mid-day meal menu for a period of four months.
The decision to send a probe team for mid-day meal implementation comes at a time when two central teams, looking into allegations of large-scale corruption in the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna (PMAY), have just concluded their inspection in East Midnapore and Malda districts and five more teams are scheduled to arrive soon to conduct PMAY surveys in nine more districts of the state.
Adhikari has already publicly claimed credit for bringing in the first set of PMAY audit teams and forecasted the arrival of the second set. Following a letter of complaint from 20 BJP parliamentarians, including 16 Lok Sabha MPs of the party from Bengal, the Union rural development ministry has withheld the disbursement of Rs 8,200 crore central allocation for the 11.36 lakh families of Bengal who were shortlisted for building pucca houses under PMAY.
In a 493-page letter to Nabanna, the ministry has asked the state to provide more clarity on the utilization of the earlier disbursed funds for MNREGA and Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna (PMGSY) as well, rendering fresh disbursement of nearly Rs 7,000 crores for the two schemes uncertain.
The areas of the mid-day meal scheme which would be audited by the joint inspection team have been clearly outlined by the education ministry. They include:
# Examine fund flow from the state government to schools and pinpoint beneficiaries
# Examine infrastructure for implementation of the scheme at district and block levels and details of foodgrains distributed by the state government to schools
# Whether permanent assets are created by the scheme
# Inspection of kitchens, cooking utensils and cutlery, whether they need to be changed
# Examine whether students get regular health check-ups, de-worming medicines etc
# Whether students and cooks have valid Aadhar Card enrolment and whether cooks get paid regularly
# Role of teachers in implementing the scheme
# Quality of food served to students and if they are regularly tasted or tested by guardians or community leaders
# Body-mass index of students and whether they receive the necessary nutrition
Predictably, the decision was countered by sharp retorts from the ruling Trinamul Congress which alleged "political vendetta" as the reason behind such moves.
“The idea is to irritate and vex the government and disturb its activities as much as possible. They won’t succeed in their attempt,” said Saugata Roy, senior Trinamul leader.
“The Centre can send as many teams as they want and try and spread as much disinformation they wish, but the people of Bengal would see through their motives. Their leaders, who have no connect with people and are trying to stay politically relevant by resorting to letter politics, will also be rejected,” added Kunal Ghosh, party spokesperson.
