INTRODUCTION

The Mid-day Meal Scheme is a school meal programme in India designed to better

the nutritional standing of school-age children nationwide. The programme supplies free lunches
on working days for children in primary and upper primary classes in government, government
aided, local body, Education Guarantee Scheme, and alternate innovative education
centres, Madarsa and Maqtabs supported under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and National Child
Labour Project schools run by the ministry of labour. Serving 120,000,000 children in over
1,265,000 schools and Education Guarantee Scheme centres, it is the largest of its kind in the
world.

HISTORY
The Mid-Day meal officially started in the state of Tamil Nadu in the 1955's.
The roots of the programme can be traced back to the pre-independence era, when a mid day
meal programme was introduced in 1925 in Madras Corporation by the British
administration. based on the recommendation of Labour Advisory Board member M. C. Rajah. A
mid day meal programme was introduced in the Union Territory of Puducherry by the French
administration in 1930.
Initiatives by state governments to children began with their launch of a mid day meal
programme in primary schools in the 1962–63 school year. Tamil Nadu is a pioneer in
introducing mid day meal programmes in India to increase the number of kids coming to
school; K. Kamaraj, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, introduced it first in Chennai and later
extended it to all districts of Tamil Nadu.
During 1982, 1 July onwards, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. G. Ramachandran upgraded
the existing Mid-day meal scheme in the state to 'Nutritious food scheme' keeping in the mind
that 68 lakh children suffer malnutrition.
Gujarat was the second state to introduce an MDM scheme in 1984, but it was later
discontinued.

IN BETWEEN 1997 – 98 MID-DAY MEAL SCHEMES WAS IMPLEMENTED ACROSS THE

COUNTRY.