The School and Mass Education (S&ME) Department will begin real time monitoring of the mid-day meal (MDM) scheme across the State through SMS-based mechanism from this week.
The recent spate of controversies in the scheme has forced the State Government to intervene at grassroot level.The need for a proper monitoring mechanism for the MDM delivery system led to the conceptualisation of the SMS-based monitoring system. The project will be facilitated by the Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC) whose ‘SMS Gateway’ will be used for the purpose.
The project is expected to be launched on pilot basis in Balasore district from this week. Under the monitoring mechanism, the principal of every school will send a text message to OCAC’s central server. The text message will contain details like the number of students who consumed the mid-day meal, menu of the meal and if there was any complication.
S&ME Department Secretary Usha Padhee said the SMS-based monitoring mechanism will provide a real time information about thousands of school students consuming the meals. Prior to this, the Government officials were dependent on monthly reports or word of mouth to get adequate information.
OCAC officials informed that the software used for the project will be developed in a manner that it can automatically filter out the anomalies in the information provided by the principals and generate an automated report.
For instance, if the principal of a certain school has been sending false reports for three days consecutively, the automated report will be sent directly to the S&ME director for evaluation. The project will be gradually phased out to more than 70,000 schools across the State.
In addition to this, a capacity building programme was undertaken by the S&ME Department in collaboration with the Institute of Tourism. Padhee informed that two people were selected from each district to be trained as the master resource persons.
During the 10-day training programme, people were trained in basic hygiene, precautions to be taken while preparing mid-day meals, mid-day meal norms and menu planning.
The trained resource persons will conduct similar training programmes at district and block levels. The cooks and helpers of the MDM will be the recipients of the training programmes. Audio-visual materials have been provided to the master resource persons to help them in the training programme.