Imphal, April 22: In consonance with the Supreme Court ruling for compulsory provision of cooked mid-day meal to school children, the State Government had implemented the novel project but doubt has been cast on whether the allocated fund has reached its rightful place.

Disclosing this to The Sangai Express, a well placed source said that an amount of over Rs 5.3 crore released by the State Government as first installment to 2987 schools under the School Education Department is likely to have been mis-utilised.

Elaborating, the source revealed that Rs 5,37,66,000 were released by the Union Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Ministry in December 2004.This amount was subsequently disbursed through respective District Rural Development Agencies.

However, despite provision for initial allocation of Rs 10,000 to each school to construct cooking sheds and to procure cooking material, no such construction has come up at majority of the schools.

Presenting a detailed account of the fund allocation, the source said that on completion of the construction of the cooking sheds the total amount entitled to each of the 2987 schools is Rs 30,000 running up to a grand total of Rs 8,96,10,000 out of which over Rs 5.3 crores had been already released.

Informing that the sheds are to be constructed on the Indira Awaz Yojna model with Centre-State ratio of 75:25, the source confided that intense scrutiny would be conducted to ascertain where the allocated fund have been diverted.

Stating that 60 percent of the Government allocation is to meet the cost of constructing cooking sheds and 40 percent for procuring rice, utensils etc, the source disclosed that the Government released the earmarked amount to authority concerned of 396 schools in Imphal East district.

Even then there is still no sign that the cooking sheds have been constructed, the source alleged while hastening to add that cooked food are nevertheless provided to the children.

The Imphal East district case is only the tip of the iceberg, said the source further.

During spot inspections at selected schools in the capital districts it was found that most of the schools do not have the cooking sheds with no sign of any construction work underway.

The cooking sheds are to be constructed either by the school development committee or the concerned or by the panchayats.

The most cruel irony is the fact that some schools which do not have any students are getting their share of the rice under the Mid-Day meal scheme, while supply of rice in some schools have been mostly erratic, added the source.

Another source alleged that Ministers and political leaders have been exerting pressure and using the favoritisms card in appointing the cooks through submission of preferred list to ZEOs concerned.

This violates guideline that the cooks should be appointed by the respective village committee.

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