Articles by Brinda Viswanathan

The 1999-2000 National Sample Survey data indicates that a large majority of children in India from poorer households did not have access to the meal schemes operational in the country. The only exception to this was Tamil Nadu where the schemes seemed to work the best in rural areas in the age group of seven to nine-year olds, without any discernible gender gap and was well targeted among the needy households. Further, among the poorer children, literacy rate and educational attainment were clearly higher when they had access to school meals perhaps implying that school enrolment and attendance improve in the presence of such schemes. This data however showed rather low coverage of Integrated Child Development Scheme among pre-school children across all states indicating problems of under-reporting or under-recording.