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Cooking large quantities of food on a mud stove leads to severe health hazards for mid-day meal cooks<\/em><\/p>\nEven the schools that got a gas connection did not refill the cylinder more than twice. The constant headaches and eye and chest diseases have a major impact on the health of the cooks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cIn the summers, cooking on the\u00a0chulha\u00a0for eight hours for up to 800 students makes me dizzy and nauseous,\u201d says Puja Devi at the Irki Primary School.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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One of the ideas behind mid-day meals was to encourage high school attendance in lieu of a good quality lunch for the most marginalised section of students. Each state has designed its weekly menu, with a complete dose of proteins, carbohydrates and minerals. Accordingly, the budget is sent to each school administration. \u201cInstead of buying good quality raw material, teachers just get some stuff from their homes. They give us ration for 35 students and ask us to cook for 70 students,\u201d says Kaushalya Devi, a cook in Bhojpur.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The corruption also extends to not buying vegetables and eggs for the meals and only feeding them\u00a0khichdi, a mixture of rice and pulses. \u201cWhen there is an egg, there is full attendance in schools. But that is becoming a rarity,\u201d she says.<\/div>\n
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Often, the children are asked to bring their own utensils from home and the plates bought for the school from the designated budget go missing. \u201cTwo years ago, a cook was fired because several children became unwell after eating the mid-day meal. Nobody questioned the headmistress who brought substandard oil from home just to pocket Rs 1,000\u201d says Kaushalya.<\/div>\n
To ensure that the mid-day meal is served in schools, the school in charge is supposed to upload pictures of food getting cooked onto an online system daily. \u201cThe teachers ask us to create fake smoke so that they can upload pictures on the server,\u201d says Ramni, another cook in Ara.<\/div>\n
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Savitri, a cook at a primary school in Patna Sahib says that teachers have little thought for the plight of the students. \u201cForget duty, they don\u2019t even have kindness for these poor kids who come to school because their parents can\u2019t afford a square meal for them,\u201d she says.<\/div>\n
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She narrates an incident where an entire batch of Class 10 students failed last year. \u201cMost of them were from the Dalit\u00a0basti. Now all of them have become thieves, drunkards and drug addicts,\u201d she says. She says that very few teachers actually teach in these schools. \u201cEarlier they used to knit sweaters, now they play games on their cell phones,\u201d she adds.<\/div>\n
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Sexual harassment at the workplace<\/strong><\/div>\n\u201cWhen you work for such little wages and you cannot leave because you have to feed your family, everyone feels entitled to put a stick in your ear and a pen in your nose when you are resting,\u201d says Sunita Devi, a 50-year-old mid-day meal cook who worked for eight years at the primary school in Nizamuddinpura of Jehanabad district.<\/div>\n
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She, along with Rinku Devi, in her mid-30s, was fired on April 26, 2017, and since then they have not been reinstated. \u201cThe headmaster, Sunil Kumar, would often call me to his room alone. I would deliberately take Sunita along, but he would get angry with me for that,\u201d says Rinku. When they started confronting him publicly for his overtures, he got upset and called a joint meeting of a few parents and some school staff members, and took the decision to fire them on account of \u201cabusive language and absence from work\u201d. Since then, new cooks have been hired at the school.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Rinku was fired as a mid-day meal cook in Jehanabad for protesting against sexual harassment<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 came into force on December 9, 2013. The legal requirement is that any workplace with more than 10 employees needs to implement the Act and form an Internal Complaints Committee to address such cases. Most primary schools in India still don\u2019t have one. There is also no clarity on whether \u2018part-time scheme workers\u2019 like the mid-day meal cooks are eligible to file a complaint with these committees, in case they have one.<\/p>\n
Most scheme workers in India related to health, education and social welfare are women. This includes 28 lakh Anganwadi workers, eight lakh Asha workers and 30 lakh mid-day meal cooks. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells us that at least 70 lakh women employed directly by the government have no legal protection at the workplace from sexual harassment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The only recourse available to the mid-day meal cooks is to approach the police. \u201cI have a son who is dealing with mental illness, my husband ends up working only five days a month. I have three more children to feed. How do I go to the police?\u201d asks Rinku.<\/div>\n
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Sunita is a widow and has been dependent on her sons for the last two years since losing her job. She had to withdraw her police case six months after filing it. She didn\u2019t have the money to pay to the lawyer for every date. \u201cWhat else could I have done? Plus, they kept saying who would harass an old woman like me. Have you seen the age of the headmaster? And as if molestation has anything to do with attraction or age,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Sunita Devi was told that she is too old to have been sexually harassed by school staff in Jehanabad<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nIn the absence of any legal recourse, most cooks have internalised a patriarchal discourse around sexual harassment as a defence mechanism. \u201cWhen you are okay and strong, who can molest you?\u201d says Gudia Devi, a cook from Fatua, as others nodded in agreement. \u201cIt depends on us, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/div>\n
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Poonam butts in, \u201cWhy is it on us? They talk about it all the time on the news, don\u2019t you see? Big reporters, ministers trouble women in large offices. Can\u2019t men control themselves? Modi says he is\u00a0chowkidar\u00a0but not for poor women, why?\u201d<\/div>\n
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She is referring to the #MeToo testimonials that came up in the media a few months ago. She later says that she believed in self-blame too, till she became a part of the larger mid-day meal cook community and her union.<\/div>\n
R.K. Mahajan, additional chief secretary, Bihar education department, says, \u201cWe have no knowledge of these sexual harassment cases, so we cannot comment.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Strike: \u2018Just stay at home, woman!\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\nAround 2015, when the mid-day meal cooks all over the state started to mobilise, it was seen as an affront to the status quo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cIt took us the longest time to convince trade unions across the board to treat this separately and take this seriously,\u201d says Saroj Chaubey, president of the Bihar Rajya Vidyalaya Rasoiya Sangh.<\/div>\n
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Female labour has a gendered, subordinate position. She says, \u201cWomen work for several hours a day, but don\u2019t have a workplace, an employer, a fixed income and official records for their back-breaking work. Sometimes, they do not even have their family\u2019s sanction to openly endorse their identity as a worker in spite of contributing to the income of the household and the country\u2019s informal economy. Trade unions have not worked enough on taking up their issues.\u201d<\/div>\n
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In 2013, the UPA government had promised mid-day meal workers that they would double their salary of Rs 1,000. The pending proposal was taken up in July 2014 by the NDA government, but the cabinet committee deferred it.<\/div>\n
The fund-sharing ratio between the Centre and the state was set at 75:25. In 2016, the NDA-2 government reset this ratio to 60:40. It was done as per the NITI Aayog\u2019s report on rationalising all the Central welfare schemes. For poorer states like Bihar, it became an added burden.<\/div>\n
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On May 24, 2018, human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar struck down a proposal to increase from a paltry Rs 1,000 a month the honorarium for cooks-cum-helpers preparing midday meals. It was\u00a0
later reported<\/a>\u00a0that a note prepared by officials of the school education department under the HRD ministry had proposed to double the honorarium and provide it for all 12 months a year instead of 10 months. But when the note went to the HRD minister for approval, he did not agree.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cFor a long time, we did small strikes to demand a pay hike. The prominent one was from October 5 to 9, 2018, when a lot of cooks organically came out and supported the strike. It conveyed to us that women are mobilising and feel so strongly about this that they are willing to step out to demand their rights,\u201d says Chaubey.<\/p>\n
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Saroj Chaubey of the Bihar Rajya Vidyalaya Rasoiya Sangh, which now has a presence in 25 districts of Bihar.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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On January 7, 2019, a joint committee was formed with four major Left-leaning mid-day meal cook unions \u2013 Bihar Rajya Vidyalaya Rasoiya Sangh, Bihar Rajya Mid-Day Meal Workers (Rasoiya), Bihar Rajya Vidyalaya Rasoiya Sangh, Bihar Rajya Madhyan Bhojan Karamchari Union \u2013 along with some NGOs, and a strike organised all over Bihar.<\/div>\n
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The major demands were that mid-day meal cooks should be recognised as workers, paid minimum wages and given social security, including a pension. They were asking for an increase in the remuneration up to minimum wages, salary for all 12 months instead of 10, 180 days paid maternity wages and to stop the privatisation of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme.<\/div>\n
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While some teachers supported them, there were also some teachers who said, \u201cOh! So now you want to be equal to us?\u201d says Kanti Devi, a cook from Fatuha.<\/div>\n
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Coming out for meetings and protests was seen as a deviation from their traditional roles, both by family members and neighbours.<\/p>\n
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The demands were not seen from a rights-based approach but a departure from their \u2018womanly behavior\u2019. Manju Devi says, \u201cThe other day, the village sarpanch said to me, \u2018I didn\u2019t know you had such a problem cooking and feeding your own neighbourhood children.’\u201d<\/p>\n
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Manju Devi outside the school kitchen in Irki<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
Gudia Devi\u2019s husband is an alcoholic. After Nitish Kumar imposed a ban on alcohol in 2016 in Bihar, he consumed a solution that was mixed with paint for almost a year. Now that bootlegging has brought alcohol back to the market, at a higher price, he often steals the money that she hides to feed her children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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For the last ten years of her marriage, domestic violence has been a constant. \u201cI had to initially hide that I was attending these meetings for the strike. When he found out, he said, \u2018You want to be Facebook-wali neta?\u2019 and injured my eye. The next day, some members of the Rasoiya Sangh landed at my house and warned him. He now abuses me verbally but hasn\u2019t hit me since then,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Sixty-one of the 69 cooks\u00a0The Wire\u00a0met had unemployed, alcoholic husbands. Their insecurity is a difficult territory to negotiate.<\/div>\n
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\u201cSome of them have now moved to weed, which has made them even slower. With no money, they now consume solution used in paints or varnish oil,\u201d says Rama Devi, a cook from Patna city.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Seema says that her husband is embarrassed that now that she has become a \u2018leader\u2019, no one recognises him. \u201cEven though he does not earn, he thinks that me demanding my rights is a disgrace to him rather than a disgrace to women not having any rights,\u201d she says.<\/div>\n
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Organising the strike was an exposure to a completely different space. \u201cWe were illiterate, so we could not make posters. So we made effigies of Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi instead. And composed songs,\u201d says Sona.<\/div>\n
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During the strike, no meals were cooked in 7,000 schools in Bihar. The teachers threatened them with pay cuts and hiring new cooks, but that didn\u2019t deter them. \u201cWe also started keeping a tab on which minister is going where. I asked my children who can read to find out from the newspaper and WhatsApp. That\u2019s how we surrounded Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Union minister, when he was in Patna,\u201d says Seema.<\/div>\n
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Prasad met a few representatives, but nothing came of it. They similarly protested at several rallies attended by Bihar ministers.<\/div>\n
Gulab Devi says, \u201cNitish didn\u2019t even come to meet us in Patna. His helicopter kept flying over our protest site every second day. He thought we will be tired of the cold weather, but we didn\u2019t budge.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Some people started photographs on their mobile phones to prove they were participating in a protest to their husbands and school staff.<\/div>\n
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\u201cThey started characterising us, calling us dangerous troublemakers,\u201d says Poonam.<\/div>\n
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The hunger strike was a relay one. Each evening, when the strikers would reach home, the husbands were least interested in what they were up to. \u201cThey were more concerned for their own dinners. So after a day of hunger strike, I would reach home, cook for him and then eat myself,\u201d says Poonam.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The strike also served as an opportunity to learn new skills. \u201cI am completely \u2018angootha chhap\u2018 but I have learned to take pictures and videos on the smartphone during the strike. Even selfies,\u201d says Sona.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n