Dr Mrigen Dutta
MDM – a key driver for
India’s egg industry
A government initiative in India
is not only ensuring children are
well nourished but helping the egg
industry to grow.
Poultry is one of the fastest growing segments of the
agricultural sector in India today. Over the last four
decades, the local industry in India has made tremendous
progress, emerging from an entirely
unorganised farming practice to
an organised intensive commercial
production system using state-of-the-art technology.
Expansion of poultry production in
India is being driven by a combination
of factors — rising per capita income,
a growing urban population and
increasing awareness of balanced
nutrition. Besides these factors, the Midday Meal Scheme (MDM), an activity
undertaken by the Indian government,
has emerged as a key growth driver for
the Indian poultry industry.
The MDM is the popular name for
the school meal programme in India.
It involves provision of lunch served
free of charge to schoolchildren on all
school days. It is possibly the largest
school lunch programme in the world,
and covered some 110 million children
in the year 2008-09.
1. Improving the nutritional
status of children in classes
I–VIII in government, local
body and government-aided
schools, EGS and AIE centres.
Major objectives
of the MDM are:
Boiled eggs have the double advantage of not
only being a good source of nutrition but also
quick and easy to prepare.
their own resources. By 1990-91, the
number of states implementing a midday
meal programme on a large scale had
increased to 12; the programme was
implemented using state resources
in combination with international
assistance.
The success of the scheme was so
spectacular that the government of India,
in August 1995, launched the “National
Programme of Nutritional Support to
Primary Education” (NP-NSPE), also
known as the MDM, as a centrally
sponsored scheme, initially in 2,408
areas in the country. By 1997-98, the NP-
NSPE was introduced countrywide.
In 2002, it was further expanded to
cover, not only children in classes I to V of government,
government-aided and local body schools, but also
children studying in Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS)
and Alternative and Innovative Education (AIE) centres.
Since 2007-08, a midday meal has also been served to the
children of upper primary classes (VI to VIII).
Objectives
Apart from enhancing school attendance and child
2. Encouraging poor children,
belonging to disadvantaged
sectors of society, to attend
school more regularly and
to help them concentrate
on classroom activities.
3. Providing nutritional support
to children of primary stage
in drought-affected areas
during summer vacation.
Background
The midday meal in schools has had a long history in
India. In 1925, a midday meal programme was introduced
for disadvantaged children by the Madras Municipal
Corporation.
By the mid-1980s, three states — Tamil Nadu, Gujarat
and Kerala and the Union Territory of Pondicherry — had
universalised a cooked midday meal programme with
