Garima Bhandari, Anindya Jayanta Mishra

Caste-based Discrimination in Mid-day Meal Scheme: An Empirical Study of Moradabad District

  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Anthropology
  • Cultural Studies
Save to CiteDrive Show PDF

Mid-day meal scheme is one of the largest schemes of its kind, which deals with the nutritional intake of children, student retention, gender equality and socialization values among primary and upper primary schools. It addresses pressing social concerns to make school education accessible to all. One of the major restraints in the effective implementation of the scheme is the caste prejudice against the Dalits, as there has always been an unequal relationship between food and caste hierarchy. To study this, in-depth interviews were taken in the schools of the Moradabad district, Uttar Pradesh, and secondary sources were used. This article analyses how identity-based discrimination is driven and reproduced on the school’s premises with the mid-day meal workers. The findings show that implicit caste biases still exist within the social structures despite various positive affirmations that impact the effective implementation of the mid-day meal scheme. It indicates that sub-categorization discrimination is practised within the ambit of the Scheduled Caste community that could not be revealed from a macro-perspective. Therefore, a discourse is needed regarding caste or identity-based discrimination until a stigma is attached to an individual’s identity.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive