Hygienic food
Source: The Sangai Express
Imphal, January 20 2014 :
The State Government has initiated necessary measures to put into practice the HRD Ministry's instruction to feed safe and hygienic food to children under the Mid-Day-Meal scheme.
An official source in Education (S) Department informed that cooks engaged for the scheme would be imparted skill training at the district level.
The training programme is aimed at making the cooks more skilful as majority of them are not skilful enough to feed save and hygienic food to children.
Notably, a major issue rocked the State of Bihar last year as many children died due to food poisoning after consuming foods provided under Mid-Day-Meal scheme.
Although the remuneration given to cooks is very small, their responsibility is enormous.
So far, 120 cooks selected from three districts have been given skill training.
40 cooks each from Senapati, Imphal West and Thoubal districts have been trained by Bangalore based Akshay Patra Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
The training module consists of personal hygiene, healthy cooking methods and proper eating manners.
Those trained cooks would, in turn, give training to other fellow cooks.
To do away with the current situation where mid-day-meal which is very close to buying food materials in credit, maximum efforts are being put in to secure release of Mid-Day-Meal regularly together with two months' fund in advance, informed the source.