RT-Engels: 17-04-2025,
Millions of women cook for 120 million children daily, yet earn less than $1 a day with no benefits or job security
In the sweltering kitchen of a primary school in Sitapur, approximately 80km from Lucknow, Sunita Devi, 45, carefully stirs an enormous pot of dal as she has done for over a decade. The steam rises, fogging her glasses, but her hands move with precision.
Sunita represents just one among nearly 2.5 million women across India who serve as the backbone of the country’s Midday Meal Scheme, now officially known as Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM-POSHAN) – a program that feeds 120 million children in 1.1 million schools nationwide.
The program dates back to 1925 when it was first introduced for disadvantaged children in Madras Municipal Corporation, in modern-day Chennai in the south. The initiative gained momentum in the mid-1980s, when states including Gujarat, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu universalized cooked meal programs using their own resources. The watershed moment came on August 15, 1995, when the government launched the National Program of Nutritional Support to Primary Education, which operated nationwide by 1997-98.
On November 28, 2001, the Supreme Court directed all state governments and union territories to implement the Midday Meal Scheme, in which every child in every government and government-aided school was to be served a cooked meal with at least 300 kilocalories and 8-12 grams of protein per day for a minimum of 200 days per year.