If the Ministry is insistent on the dry rations being converted into cooked meals, it will also have to shell out an additional Rs 12,000 crore for employing cooks. This is unlikely at a time when the Ministry has already crossed this year's allocation for the scheme. Having spent Rs 1,000 crore on the scheme for 1998-99, the Ministry has asked for an additional Rs 400 crore to meet this year's requirement.

The Ministry, in conjunction with UNICEF, has also commissioned the Operations Research Group (ORG) to do a survey of the scheme in 10 states to assess its success.Preliminary findings suggest that enrollment has risen by 10 per cent. But when the ORG report comes in within a month, the Ministry may also consider streamlining the scheme, which costs about 40 per cent of the entire amount spent on elementary education. One of the major problems with the scheme is that every year only 70 per cent of the foodgrains allocated are actually distributed by the Food Corporation of India (FCI).

As of now, the mid-day meals scheme extends to all the states (except Lakshwadeep, where the cost of transportation turned out to be higher than the cost of dry rations).

The HRD Ministry could focus the scheme more sharply on children below the poverty line, on malnourished children, or even on girls. None of these decisions will be easy as this scheme is almost universally regarded as being popular. It is meant to enhance nutritional levels as well as increase the children participation in primary schools.

But clearly, the HRD Ministry has now reached its limit as far asconverting the dry rations into cooked meals is concerned. Dry rations was only supposed to be an interim measure. While Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Pondicherry, Orissa and some blocks of Madhya Pradesh have introduced hot cooked meals, Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir who had introduced the scheme right at the beginning, soon relapsed into suplying dry rations.

According to the recent Public Report on Basic Education in India, which was released by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, and covered 162 schools in five States, the dry rations arrangement rewards enrollment rather than attendance. The report says, "While dry rations do seem to boost enrollment, their effect on attendance is likely to be much weaker." It also says that the promised monthly rations often fail to materialise. "In large parts of Bihar, no food was released in 1996," it says, "supply failures and delays were also noted in a majority of schools in other states".

In Bihar, only 31 per cent of the foodgrains allocated were lifted by the FCI in 1997-98,while in Uttar Pradesh, it was a healthy 93 per cent.