What came first? The chicken or… the controversy? Well, in Bengal, the two seem to have come hand in hand.

A day after a Bengal government circular notified that chicken and seasonal fruits would be included in mid-day meals for students for a period of four months till April this year, the state’s Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari wrote to Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, urging him to send a central audit team to probe alleged large scale “misappropriation of mid-day meal funds” in the state.

The Mamata Banerjee government allotted an additional Rs 371 crore to introduce chicken and seasonal fruits to be served once weekly in addition to the existing mid-day meal menu of rice, potato, soybean and eggs for the 11.6 million children enrolled in state-run and aided schools. But Adhikari alleged that “one of the biggest ongoing scams being committed by the Government of West Bengal is the Mid Day Meal scam or PM Poshan scam. The misappropriation of funds granted by the Central Government in this regard has been systematically diverted unethically by the State Government on a regular basis to serve their own interests.”

The cost of mid-day meals for students is shared by the Centre and state on a 60:40 ratio.

An amount of Rs 20 will be spent per week on providing additional nutrition to every student, and the process will continue for 16 weeks, the January 3 notification by the state education department read.

The upgrade in meal menu has raised political eyebrows with the BJP questioning whether the decision was taken to appease rural voters ahead of the state panchayat polls due in a few months. The question has gathered steam in the wake of senior school education department officials confirming that the additional provision is unlikely to continue after April this year.

In his letter to the Union education minister dated 5 January, Adhikari pinpointed six means through which mid-day meal funds were being “misappropriated”. These were artificial augmentation of cooking costs, misappropriation of honorarium of Self Help Groups, inflated enrolment of students through faulty updates in the Banglar Siksha portal, false billing, misappropriation of extra cooking costs by corrupt teachers and school management and non-compliance with the mandatory food menu.

At a time when a set of central teams are already conducting grassroots audit of the corruption charges on Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna in Bengal, much to the chagrin of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who has made her discontentment public, the controversy over mid-day meals could well become the newest political flashpoint between the ruling dispensation and its primary opposition in Bengal. Now, all eyes are on the Centre to see how it responds to the state BJP leader’s allegations.