The Mid-Day Meal Scheme Now Serves 11.20 Crore Children in 10.36 Lakh Schools as PM POSHAN, After Tamil Nadu's Noon Meals, a 2001 Supreme Court Order and the 2013 Food Security Act

The Ministry of Education reported on 10 April 2025 that PM POSHAN, the scheme long known as the mid-day meal scheme, serves one hot cooked meal on every school day to 11.20 crore students in Bal Vatika (the year before Class 1) and Classes I to VIII, in 10.36 lakh government and government-aided schools. A 2021 paper in Nature Communications called it the largest school feeding programme in the world and counted 97.8 million children receiving a free cooked meal each day in 2016 to 2017.

The scheme runs from Tamil Nadu’s noon meals through a national programme launched on 15 August 1995, a Supreme Court order of 28 November 2001 and the National Food Security Act of 2013.

Tamil Nadu served noon meals first

A. Mahendran and S. Indrakant write in a 2014 paper that Chief Minister K. Kamaraj started Tamil Nadu’s mid-day meal scheme in early 1956, in government primary schools, covering about 2 million children. Business Today’s 2013 account dates the idea to the early 1960s and tells it as a story. Kamaraj, it says, asked a cattle-herding boy in Cheranmahadevi, Tirunelveli district, why he was not in school, and the boy answered, “I can learn only if I eat.” The two accounts give different start years, and the sources opened for this article do not settle which is right.

On 1 July 1982, according to Mahendran and Indrakant, Chief Minister M. G. Ramachandran replaced the scheme with a Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme that covered 5.6 million children in about 32,000 elementary schools and 20,000 child welfare centres. On 15 September 1982 it was extended to urban schools.

Jean Dreze and Aparajita Goyal visited nine primary schools in three Tamil Nadu districts in 2003 and wrote that the state had served school meals with “clock-like regularity” for more than 20 years. Each school had a cooking shed and three paid staff, and meals were served every day of the year, holidays included. More on the state is in Tamil Nadu at a glance.

1995: a national programme that began with dry rations

The Centre launched the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education on 15 August 1995, as a centrally sponsored scheme. Meghalaya’s official mid-day meal site records that it began by giving dry ration at 100 grams per child per day. Dreze and Goyal write that cooked meals were meant to reach all government and aided primary schools within two years, that states could hand out monthly grain rations in the meantime, and that six years later most states had not yet made the switch.

The Supreme Court order of 28 November 2001

The People’s Union for Civil Liberties filed a writ petition in April 2001 arguing that the right to food follows from the right to life in Article 21 of the Constitution. On 28 November 2001, Justices B. N. Kirpal and K. G. Balakrishnan issued an interim order in Writ Petition (Civil) No. 196 of 2001. It directed every state and union territory to give each child in every government and government-assisted primary school a prepared midday meal with at least 300 calories and 8 to 12 grams of protein, on each school day, for at least 200 days.

States that were giving dry rations had to begin cooked meals within three months in half their districts, taking the poorest first, and in the rest within a further three months. The order also told the Union and the Food Corporation of India to supply fair average quality grain, checked in joint inspections with the states. The route such a case takes is in how a case reaches the Supreme Court.

Dreze and Goyal report that most states missed the deadline and that Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh had not complied in 2003. Follow-up orders of 20 April 2004, as the Right to Food Campaign’s booklet records them, said no money may be collected from parents or children, gave preference to Dalits, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in hiring cooks and helpers, required meals in drought-affected areas during summer vacations and told the Centre to provide kitchen sheds. In October 2004 the Court directed the Centre to give Re 1 per child per school day toward cooking costs. The booklet reads the orders as making every school-going child entitled to a cooked meal.

The Nature Communications paper, using National Sample Survey data, found the share of girls aged 6 to 10 receiving a school meal rose from 6 percent in 1999 to 32 percent in 2004 and 46 percent in 2011.

The 2013 Act and the 2015 rules

The National Food Security Act received presidential assent on 10 September 2013. Section 5(1)(b) gives every child up to Class VIII, or aged six to fourteen, one mid-day meal free of charge every day except school holidays, in all schools run by local bodies and in government and government-aided schools, meeting the standards in Schedule II. Section 5(2) requires each such school to have facilities for cooking, drinking water and sanitation, and lets urban areas use centralised kitchens. Section 8 entitles people to a food security allowance from the state when entitled meals are not supplied.

The Mid-Day Meal Rules, notified on 30 September 2015, say what that allowance means. If no meal is served on a school day for any reason, including a shortage of grain, cooking cost or fuel or the absence of the cook-cum-helper, the state pays the allowance by the 15th of the next month, set at the child’s foodgrain entitlement plus the state’s cooking cost. No claim lies where a child declined the food on offer. States must fix responsibility when meals are missed on three consecutive school days or on five days in a month, and the state food authority may sample meals monthly from random schools or centralised kitchens for testing in accredited laboratories.

What PM POSHAN provides and what it costs

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the scheme, under its new name, on 29 September 2021 for 2021-22 to 2025-26. The outlay was Rs 54,061.73 crore from the Centre and Rs 31,733.17 crore from states and union territories, plus about Rs 45,000 crore of foodgrain borne by the Centre, a total of Rs 1,30,794.90 crore. The release counted 11.80 crore children in 11.20 lakh schools and said the Centre had invested more than Rs 24,400 crore in 2020-21, about Rs 11,500 crore of it on foodgrain. It added Bal Vatika classes, encouraged Tithi Bhojan (community members giving special food on festivals), counted school nutrition gardens in more than 3 lakh schools and made social audit mandatory in every district. It is a centrally sponsored scheme, with the cost shared.

The Ministry of Education’s reply of 27 July 2026 sets the nutrition norms. A primary-class child is to get 450 calories and 12 grams of protein a day, from 100 grams of foodgrain, 20 grams of pulses, 50 grams of vegetables and 5 grams of oil or fat. An upper-primary child is to get 700 calories and 20 grams of protein, from 150 grams of grain, 30 grams of pulses, 75 grams of vegetables and 7.5 grams of oil. A flexible component of 5 percent of the recurring budget is set aside for nutrition gardens and extra nutrition in identified districts.

From 1 May 2025 the ministry raised the material cost, the money for pulses, vegetables, oil, spices and fuel, by 9.50 percent, to Rs 6.78 per child per day for Bal Vatika and primary classes and Rs 10.17 for upper primary, at a cost to the Centre of about Rs 954 crore in 2025-26. States may add more. The Centre supplies about 26 lakh tonnes of foodgrain through the Food Corporation of India at a subsidy of roughly Rs 9,000 crore a year, and pays for its transport. With grain included, the release puts a meal at about Rs 12.13 for primary children and Rs 17.62 for upper primary.

Attendance, hunger and growth: what the studies found

Dreze and Goyal surveyed 81 schools in nine districts of Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Rajasthan between January and April 2003 and found meals served regularly in 76 of them. Class 1 enrolment in those schools rose 14.5 percent between July 2001 and July 2002, and 19 percent for girls, against a national trend of about 2 percent a year in the 1990s. The authors called the findings preliminary.

Farzana Afridi studied schools in one block of Chhindwara district in Madhya Pradesh that switched from monthly grain to cooked meals at different times in 2003. Attendance of girls in grade one was more than 12 percentage points higher after the switch, the boys’ result was positive but not statistically significant, and the effect on enrolment was insignificant. In a separate paper, Afridi found that on school days participants’ nutrient intake rose by an amount equal to 49 to 100 percent of what the meal supplied. For about 3 US cents per child per school day, she reports, the scheme cut a primary pupil’s daily protein deficiency by 100 percent, calorie deficiency by almost 30 percent and iron deficiency by nearly 10 percent.

Abhijeet Singh, Albert Park and Stefan Dercon used Young Lives data on 1,950 children in Andhra Pradesh, where cooked meals began in January 2003. They found that drought had cut children’s height-for-age and weight-for-age, and that the meal scheme offset the loss entirely for children whose families reported being hit by drought.

Learning, growth and the next generation

Tanika Chakraborty and Rajshri Jayaraman used the staggered state rollout after the 2001 order to compare birth cohorts with different years of exposure. They found a positive effect of prolonged exposure on children’s maths and reading scores.

Suman Chakrabarti and colleagues linked district coverage for girls born between 1980 and 1998 to the height of children surveyed in the 2016 National Family Health Survey. Children of mothers with full exposure to the scheme had a height-for-age score 0.40 standard deviations higher than children of unexposed mothers, and the association was larger in poorer households (0.5 standard deviations). They estimate the scheme is associated with 13 to 32 percent of the national improvement in child height between 2006 and 2016. Their coverage measure records potential exposure, not meals each mother ate, and the authors say they could not follow a randomised group of girls into adulthood.

Akshaya Patra and centralised kitchens

The Akshaya Patra Foundation marked 5 billion meals and 25 years of service in March 2026, according to Telangana Today. It reports serving 2.35 million children a day from kitchens in 78 locations across 16 states and 3 union territories, with a target of 3 million by 2030. In Telangana it cooks 2.5 lakh meals a day in five centralised kitchens.

The law allows this model in towns. The 2013 Act lets urban areas use centralised kitchens, the 2015 rules require the meal to be served at the school itself, and the allowance is recovered from the kitchen if it fails to supply. Tamil Nadu, as Dreze and Goyal described it, gave each school its own cook, helper and organiser.

What the figures also show

The ministry’s 2021 and 2025 releases give 11.80 crore children in 11.20 lakh schools and 11.20 crore children in 10.36 lakh schools. Neither release explains the difference.

Food safety has a documented failure. On 16 July 2013, 23 children died in Gandaman village in Bihar after eating a school lunch. A 2013 editorial in Archives of Toxicology reported that forensic analysis found high levels of the pesticide monocrotophos in the cooking oil used for the meal.

The Ministry of Education told the Lok Sabha on 27 July 2026 that an evaluation of the scheme by NITI Aayog through an independent third-party agency in 2025 to 2026 concluded that PM POSHAN has a positive impact on improving child nutrition and boosting learning outcomes. The reply does not give the study’s figures.