All for a Midday Meal
To avoid any possible contact, they are served from a ‘safe’ distance
One of the main objectives of the midday meal scheme, apart from improving the nutritional health of children, is to promote social equity by having students from different social backgrounds sit and eat together. But reality remains far from this intention. The goal of interdining is regularly breached by social bias stemmed in the caste system of India, as evident from countless incidents and abundant reports received in the past decade.
Caste segregation and discrimination is transparently visible in the treatment of the lowered caste constituents of this system. Children from these families are made to sit separately, and cooks from the lowered castes are deemed highly unacceptable by dominant caste parents who refuse to accept their services.