Poshan to Paathshala, with love
By Rushi Vyas
This post was originally published on July 19, 2019.
Education is every child’s right irrespective of where she or he is from. Sadly, India is a country where people stand in huge lines to get admission forms, and spend a fortune on their child’s education. But there are also people who can’t afford to send their children to school. Despite the government’s initiatives regarding education, in India, about 85 million children between the ages of 5–6 are unable to attend school due to financial instability.
India’s mid-day meal scheme is the world’s largest school meal programme, covering nearly 120 million children in government funded elementary schools. This initiative encourages children to attend school as parents in turn save money on food & education. But despite this overwhelming number, there are a large number of non-governmental schools that do not and cannot provide meals, hence hampering student attendance.
With nearly 40% of all children undernourished, India has the world’s highest number of malnourished children. As per Unicef — nearly half of all deaths in children under 5 are attributable to undernutrition.
Undernutrition puts children at greater risk of dying from common infections, increases the frequency and severity of such infections, and delays recovery.
Children from poor neighborhoods are also made to beg and partake in child labour instead of going to school. Lack of education can lead to crime, poverty, drug use and sexual risks. We institutionalized our ‘Poshan to Pathsala’ program to push for reliable and early access to nutrition for children — by serving meals as an incentive for education.
Through this program we partner with government and non-government schools in slums and motivate economically constrained parents in the vicinity, to send their children to school. Freshly cooked food (or raw grains to cook meals with) are served for 50–250 children in our partnered slum schools. This includes children between the age group of 5–12 years who would otherwise go to work at labor sites.
We believe that when children are guaranteed meals in schools, parents are less likely to make them beg, or partake in child labour. They can get better nourishment, focus on studies, develop skills that allow them to get better jobs, and become independent meal earners.
