Deborah seeks salary hike for midday meal cooks, helps

NEW DELHI: Meghalaya’s demand for increasing the honorarium to cooks and helpers, who prepare midday meals for lakhs of school students, to a reasonable amount found unstinted support from all states during the meeting of the empowered committee here on Wednesday.
Making her maiden speech at the meeting, the State’s Education Minister, Deborah Marak, said MDM cooks and helpers get a meager Rs 1,000 a month in most states. Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, who will visit Shillong on September 19, expressed his surprise over the paltry payment for the vital central scheme.
Deborah also demanded an increase in the quota of rice under MDM scheme for the hill state. “Most of the students are rice eaters and the State needs more rice through FCI for this purpose,” she said.
Representatives of state governments, Food and Nutrition experts and senior officers of the Central government participated in the meeting.
The Committee reviewed MDM implementation and decided to strengthen the monitoring system as well as to ensure community participation in executing the Scheme.
Also, there is no uniformity in payments in different states and there is a demand for regularisation of services. For instance, MDM cooks in Meghalaya got Rs 1,000 per month for 10 months.
Deborah said with such minimum payment, the cooks and helps cannot prepare hygienic meals. She also pointed out that this unique scheme could arrest school dropouts to a large extent in many states, including in Meghalaya.