Education <i>Ab Ova</i>: A Debate on Serving Eggs in Indian Schools
The debate on serving eggs in public schools is connected to the main challenges of Indian education.
There are three maps that largely overlap in today’s India: The one that marks the regions with a larger population of vegetarians, the one that shows the states that do not serve eggs as part of lunch in their public schools, and the one that displays the states ruled by the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
India’s 1950 constitution promised to “endeavor” to provide free, compulsory, and universal education within 10 years. While the goal was not reached within that period, the country did take great strides in raising the numbers of school-going and literate children. It was only in 2009 that education has been made formally compulsory and free under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. While education in public schools is mostly costless, especially for poor families, the compulsory part is much less apparent. The 2011 census data suggested there were still 84 million children in the 5-17 age range who did not attend schools, in a nation of 1.2 billion people.
A larger question than that of compulsion – what should the state do to force parents to send their children to school – is that of assistance: What steps should the Indian government, at various levels, take to facilitate the poor, in particular, attending schools. It is wrong to think that the poor of India do not want their children to study in schools; both data and experience suggest a contrary conclusion. Economically deprived families face their own compulsions, however: They must first of all sustain themselves. The same 2011 census data claims that there were an additional 7.8 million children who were working while studying in school.
The “Midday Meal Scheme,” which was introduced at the national level in 1995, has helped in this effort. Most often, it simply means that the children are given a free lunch. The program likely helped in bringing many kids of poorer families to school. I do not mean to argue that the poor send their children to school only because of free food, but that this scheme makes it possible for them to do so. Education is still the most important factor. The scheme helps the poor in managing otherwise tough choices. By sending their children to school they will not have to pay the cost of their lunches themselves and will mostly be assured that their kids will have at least one proper, warm meal a day.
This, however, brings the issue of proper nutrition to the forefront. In this way, government has become responsible for providing the most important meal of the day to millions of poor children in India.
More than 80 percent of India’s population is Hindu and although many Hindus do eat meat, vegetarianism is held up in this religious community as the more ethical and orthodox way of life. Vegetarianism is especially binding for the priestly class (the Brahmans), while the lowest castes often are not traditionally expected to follow it and do not economically have the luxury of picking their desired diet. Yet, the Midday Meal Scheme provides predominantly – or only – vegetarian food. This has been rightly termed “institutionalizing vegetarianism” in a country whose population is very diverse both in terms of religious practices and diet. Moreover, eggs were also left out of the midday meal in many states. This has happened not only in public schools but also in anganwadis – the government care centers that provide basic amenities and health services to rural children. There appears to be a strong correlation between avoiding eggs in the midday meal program and the rule of BJP governments, as the BJP is a Hindu nationalist party.
In India, education is on what is called the “concurrent” list of the Constitution: Both the state governments and the central government of the republic may decide about it. In practice, this means that state governments have much freedom in shaping educational policies. In 2015, for instance, the BJP government of Madhya Pradesh (in central India) withdrew eggs from meals served in anganwadis. In the southern state of Karnataka – which has the highest number of vegetarians across south India – it was the BJP government that introduced eggs in anganwadis in 2017, and faced the opposition of orthodox Hindu groups for doing so.
The states in India’s west, north and northwest mostly do not serve eggs either in schools or in anganwadis at present. These states (Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh) have also been mostly ruled by the BJP in recent years. They are also the same states that reportedly have the highest number of vegetarians in their population.
Most of southern and eastern India has a much smaller population of vegetarians and as this customary diet is less ideologically influential there, both schools and anganwadis do serve eggs. A curious situation took place the eastern state of Odisha recently. As the government was not able to finance meals in all of its schools, it relied on the support of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in many places. The religious group refused to serve eggs in its meals, however. As a final compromise it was said that the government schools would obtain and prepare the eggs themselves but the charity would pay their cost.
The debate, therefore, is mostly not even about meat – as not serving it seems to be a foregone conclusion – but about whether eggs should be served in schools or not. Two broad approaches collide here: One takes into account the dominant Hindu traditions and the ethical idea of nonviolence but the other attitude – the one supported by Right to Food activists – points out that the eggs are an important part of a child’s nutrition, especially in case of poor children, for whom the school lunch has become the core element of their diet.
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Krzysztof Iwanek is the chair of the Asia Research Centre at the National Defence University at Warsaw and a South Asia expert with the Poland-Asia Research Center. He writes for The Diplomat’s Asia Life section.