What’s for dinner? “I will cook only if we are hungry," she replied. The wheat and rice she gets from PDS lasts not more than a week. So every morsel is to be saved. Her husband, who has not found work in more than a week, was in the forest, collecting wood; a head-load will sell for ₹50 in a nearby market. When asked what she may purchase if she had ₹500, Genda Bai stubbornly refused to answer. It is pointless to dream about food when you have no money, she said.

No jobs for the asking

In their struggle to put food on the plate, families in this village have stretched themselves thin. Most send the elderly and children to look after crop fields of upper-caste landlords. The wheat and mustard crop need protection from wild animals and stray cattle till it is harvested. For this 24/7 work spanning five months, families are paid in kind—about 200kg of wheat or ₹4,000. This translates to a wage of ₹27 for every 24 hours of work. This poorly paid job is reserved for the elderly and children. But this also means no child in the village goes to school, missing out on even the meagre midday meals.

Amid the ongoing jobs crisis, the rural employment guarantee scheme failed to keep up to its promise—till date about 1.77 billion man-days of work was generated under the scheme in 2019-20 (April to December), far short of the 2.68 billion man-days in 2018-19.

In the three districts that Mint travelled to, the complaints were similar: too few days of work on offer and wage payments delayed by more than a month.

The rural jobs scheme is being starved of funds at a time when informal jobs have dried up, impacting food security of vulnerable households, said Nikhil Dey, a social activist who tracks the programme closely. Workers in states like Rajasthan, for instance, have not received any payments since October. Earlier too, implementation of the scheme was affected due to the general election held in May.

Drinking a meal

At 12.30 in the afternoon last Tuesday, the children in Pathroudi Primary School in Chitrakoot were having a mock fight with their plates. It is time for the midday meal. The day’s menu, painted on the walls outside the school kitchen, states they will be served pulses cooked with vegetables along with steamed rice.

The rice is ready but the lentils are a sight to behold. It looked more like watery gruel with a few strands of spinach thrown in. On a child’s plate it emerged as an island of rice floating on a green lake. As children fiddled with the food, a teacher urged them to drink it up.

Under the centrally sponsored Mid-Day Meal Scheme, children from Class I to Class V are entitled to vegetables and pulses worth ₹4.50 per day, in addition to rice and wheat that is supplied from PDS, fuel for cooking and monthly payments for cooks. The day Mint visited this school, 49 children were present.

The pulses—that are served with rice— were cooked with just 250 grams of greens and half a kg of pigeon peas. Clearly, a fraction of the sanctioned amount has been spent by the school teachers and village local bodies who oversee implementation of the scheme. The experience was no different in all the three schools that Mint visited in Bundelkhand. “There is hardly any monitoring of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme or problems faced by families while accessing subsidized food grains," said Raja Bhaiya, who heads a local non-profit Vidya Dham Samiti.

The Aadhaar factor

The use of technology like Aadhaar— introduced to reduce corruption and pilferage—has meant additional hardship for families. Around 12 noon on 11 December, the subsidized PDS shop at Parmai village in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district was teeming with people. They were waiting for electricity supply to be restored so that the biometric authentication machines could work.