×
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

New way to check midday meal scheme

Last Updated 24 May 2015, 19:39 IST

Cell phones of teachers will soon ring every day and callers will seek to know on behalf of the government if they duly served the midday meal in their schools that day.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry is set to launch a new system for collecting real-time information on the implementation of the midday meal scheme from schools across the country. The real-time information on cooking and serving of the midday meal to school children will be collected from teachers concerned through an interactive voice response system (IVRS). The mechanism is being developed by the National Informatics Centre.

The ministry recently asked state governments and Union territory administrations at a meeting of the project approval board (PAB) to provide it with the mobile numbers of their school teachers.

The numbers of school teachers will be fed in the system for the collection of real-time information on cooking and serving of midday meal to children. The ministry is in process of floating tender for selection of service providers to implement the IVRS project in states and union territories. None of bidders could qualify for the project when the Ministry floated a tender last time.

The ministry is keen on rolling out the IVRS system by July this year, sources said.“The basic objective is real-time monitoring of the midday meal scheme. Once the system is in place, the ministry will be in a position to know every day whether meal was served to the children or not. If not served, why not? Teachers concerned will have to feed such information. This will help the ministry keep a close tab on the implementation of the project,” a state government official, who attended the PAB meeting, told Deccan Herald.

The information to be collected through IVRS will automatically be routed to a centralised data bank being created for the purpose. The key indicators will be made public so that various stakeholders can see them and inform the Ministry if there was any discrepancy in the submission of the reports by teachers, he added.

An online system for monitoring of the scheme is already functional since 2012 where annual and monthly data relating to the implementation of the scheme is uploaded on a portal. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have already launched such a system to monitor the implementation of mid-day meal programme.

ADVERTISEMENT
(Published 24 May 2015, 19:39 IST)

Follow us on

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT