So, last week I wrote about what a school meal is worth. While researching that one I came across two videos, and this edition is basically about what I found when I looked into them.

On 5th August, a journalist posted a video from a government primary school in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh. Children were served a watery aloo curry, potato pieces floating in what was mostly water, with burnt rotis. 

At one point a roti falls on the floor, and a child picks it up and puts it back on his plate. The milk was less than the norms require..

And this video travelled fast.

Within days the district administration had suspended the head teacher, Kalpana Verma, terminated the cook, Aneeta, and filed an FIR against both for criminal breach of trust and embezzling government food supplies.

Departmental proceedings were opened against the Block Education Officer.

It looks like the system is working. 

It isn't.

Around the same week, another video came out of Ballia, also in UP.

The reaction was the same.

Officiating principal Kiran Devi was suspended, a contractual instructor was terminated, and 4 cooks were issued warnings.

But look at the dates. The inquiry found that the incident happened on 20 April, and the video only surfaced on 31 July.

That's three months of meals being served every day, with nothing happening, until the clip went online and then everything happened inside a week.

There is one more detail - the inquiry also found the video was recorded on the phone of one of the instructors, allegedly to blackmail the principal.

So the only reason anyone in the state government learned that children in Palia were eating off their palms is that a colleague was, allegedly, trying to threaten her boss with it.

That was the detection mechanism that finally worked.

Every day, before the food goes to a single child, two or three adults including at least one teacher are supposed to taste the meal. 

Above that sits a School Management Committee. Then a Village Education Committee. Then block and district monitoring committees that are supposed to meet every month. Then a state committee chaired by the Chief Secretary, and a national committee above that.

There is a social audit twice every academic year under the Food Security Act. There is lab testing of samples. There is an automated system that pulls data from every school every day by SMS or app, into a central portal tracking meals served, grain used and inspections done.

Five tiers of committees, a daily tasting rule, twice-yearly audits, daily national data collection. And in Ballia it took three months and an alleged blackmail attempt.

An analysis of the scheme's food safety record says it plainly. 

Despite the requirement for school management committees, designated teachers and nodal officers to oversee compliance, institutional action after food safety lapses is rare.

The data on the central portal is inconsistent and doesn't connect to health or inspection records.

So in both these schools, the tasting either didn't happen or happened and changed nothing. The committees either didn't meet or met and didn't look. The portal recorded a meal served, which was true.

In Mirzapur in 2019, children were served roti with salt.
The same year in Sonbhadra, one litre of milk was mixed into a bucket of water and served to 81 students.
In Meerut in 2021, two litres of milk were stretched with five litres of water.
In Mahoba, earlier this year, milk was diluted before serving.

Sonbhadra came back in 2022 with roti and salt again, and the principal was suspended after two youths recorded the children talking about it. 

This January in Maihar, Madhya Pradesh, children ate their Republic Day meal off torn pages from old notebooks.

Somebody filmed every single one.

Not one of them came through a committee, an audit, or the daily tasting. In each case the formal system was running normally right up until a video appeared.

Which means enforcement only reaches the places that can be seen. A school where a visitor has a smartphone. A village with connectivity and somebody willing to post. Everywhere else, the same watery curry produces nothing at all.

In Sitapur, the head teacher was suspended, the cook was terminated and charged with embezzlement, and the Block Education Officer, whose job includes inspecting these schools, got departmental proceedings. In Ballia, the principal was suspended and four cooks got warnings.

The further up you go, the softer it gets.

The cook is the part I keep coming back to. Last week I wrote that the Centre pays a cook-cum-helper ₹1,000 a month, unchanged since December 2009, for ten months of the year, and classifies her as a volunteer rather than a worker so minimum wage law doesn't apply to her.

Aneeta was the last link in a chain that runs from a central budget through a state government, a district office and a block officer, down to a kitchen. She is by a distance the cheapest person in it. She is also the one facing a criminal case.

I'm not saying she's innocent. I don't know, and the inquiry may well find theft. What I'm saying is that a week after the video, the system found someone to punish, and it was the person at the very bottom, on ₹1,000 a month, in a scheme where the material cost of the entire meal is ₹6.78 a day.

When a video produces a suspension in three days, it feels like accountability finally working.

It's the opposite. It's accountability having failed at every point where it was supposed to work, and one case getting lucky.

The tasting failed. The committees failed. The audits failed. The portal showed nothing wrong. Everything built for exactly this did nothing, and the correction came from outside the system, through a phone and an algorithm, and in Ballia, apparently, through a grudge.

And I keep asking myself the same thing about the places I'm responsible for. How do I find out when something's going wrong? Through the process I built for it, or because somebody eventually made enough noise that I couldn't avoid it?

If it's the second one, then whatever process I set up isn't doing anything, and I've just been fortunate about which problems happened to get loud.

Hit reply and tell me about a time you complained properly and nothing moved. I want to know how common this is.

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. The practical lesson here is fairly bleak. If you want something fixed in India, a complaint through the proper channel is worth less than thirty seconds of video. Most of us already know this, which is why we reach for the phone before the grievance portal. It works. That's the problem.