Imphal, January 30 2010: Food being fed to students of Upper Primary School stage under the National Programme for Mid-Day Meal would be augmented besides recruiting adequate number of cook cum helpers.

An official source informed that the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development has revised the Mid-Day Meal programme to augment the meal being provided to students of Upper Primary State and also to recruit more cooks cum helpers, proportionate to the number of students.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Mid-Day Meal Division sent a written instruction to the State Government on November 25 to implement the revised programme.

According to the revised norms, each student of Upper Primary stage would get 30 grams of pulse and 75 grams of vegetables.

At present, the daily ration for each student is 25 grams of pulse and 65 grams of vegetables.

The revised norms made no changes in the daily allocation of food-grains which is 150 grams per student per day.

However, the daily allocation of oil and fat has been reduced to 7.5 grams from the current allocation of 10 grams.

For students of Primary School, no changes has been made in the daily allocation of mid-day meal.

Monthly honorarium for cooks cum helpers would now be Rs 1000.As per the revised norm, schools having 25 students would have one cook cum helper.

There would be two cooks cum helpers in each school having 26 to 100 students and one additional cook cum helper in schools where there are more than 100 students.

For Northeastern States, the Centre would pay 90 per cent of the honorarium to be given to cooks cum helpers while the State Governments would produce the remaining 10 percent.

According to the revised norm, cooking cost of one meal for Primary students is Rs 2.50 while those of Upper Primary students has been fixed at Rs 3.75 per meal.

This would not cover labour and administration costs.

The cooking cost would be incorporated in the costs of pulses, vegetables, oil and fat, salt and condiments and fuel.

Like honorarium, the cooking costs would be shared between the Centre and State Governments of the Northeastern States at 90 per cent and 10 percent respectively.

The revised norm mentioned that the States and Union Territories may increase their percentage of contribution towards the cooking costs in order to make the meals better.

The cooking cost would be revised on April 1 this year and again on the same date in 2011 and increase it at the rate of 7.5 per cent.

The written instruction sent by the Ministry of Human Resources Development mentioned that the revised norm should be implemented with effect from December 1 last year.

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