A Kitchen That Prepares Lunch for Schoolchildren in Delhi

Courtesy of Pamposh Raina Workers filling steel containers with rice at the Stri Shakti kitchen in West Delhi.

NEW DELHI - In the Chandni Chowk area of north Delhi, a dilapidated mansion built in 1923 houses a government-run primary school. Every day, Raj Kumar, 42, a contractor, transports boxed free lunches to the school. Earlier this week, he opened a container to show out how it was still half full.

“Look how much food went to waste today,” he said. “These children have been eating less since they heard about the deaths in Bihar.”

That day, the children in New Delhi had received a meal of chickpeas and semolina pudding as per the menu set by the government department that administers the school lunch program. The food was prepared in a central kitchen run by a nongovernmental organization, unlike in Bihar, where the meal that killed 23 children last week was prepared inside the school complex. The principal of the school was arrested Wednesday by the police.

Around one million children are fed through the midday meal program in Delhi. The free lunch program, which covers nearly 120 million schoolchildren across the country, aims to tackle malnutrition and encourage school attendance.

The Chandni Chowk school has 60 students from Grades 1 through 5. The school principal and his staff have been trying to reassure the students that the food served to them is not contaminated.

“We taste the food first before serving it to the children,” said S. P. Sharma, the school principal.

The seal of the packed food containers is opened in front of Mr. Sharma. He said the children were served in dishes that they bring from their homes. After the children are served, the food supplier returns the leftovers to the central kitchen.

“The children are fed fresh food every day,” Mr. Sharma said.

The food served at Mr. Sharma's school is prepared by Stri Shakti, a nongovernmental organization, which runs a central kitchen out of a compound in the Nangloi area of west Delhi, around 19 miles away.

The organization runs five kitchens that daily prepare lunch for around 300,000 children enrolled in government schools of New Delhi.

“We have been doing this for almost 10 years in Delhi,” said Saravjeet Kaur, who is a director with Stri Shakti, which also operates centralized kitchens to feed schoolchildren in other cities, including Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh.

Mrs. Kaur watched over the kitchen staff from her office through a monitor connected to a camera in the kitchen.

In a 1,500-square-foot kitchen, a staff of 80 people, including 50 women, works two shifts to meet the daily demands of preparing the food that fills nearly 950 steel containers, which are sealed with plastic tape before being loaded onto vehicles. The staff starts as early as 7 a.m. to prepare the first round of meals for students enrolled in regular school, who are supposed to receive their free lunch at 10:30 a.m. The afternoon batch is fed at 2:30 p.m.

Men and women go about their routine tasks in the kitchen wearing uniforms, which include a bandanna and a separate pair of slippers, the only footwear allowed inside the kitchen. Men wore brown loose pants with a shirt, and women were dressed in a red-checkered salwar kameez, traditional Indian attire.

On this particular day, a fresh batch of rice had just been unloaded onto an aluminum tray from a rice cooker that can handle up to 330 pounds of rice. Approximately 5,000 kilograms are cooked on a day when rice is on the menu.

“Most of the food in the kitchen is steam cooked, a more economical and safer mode of cooking,” said Gurcharan Singh, a manager at Stri Shakti. Two gargantuan steam boilers fitted outside were connected to 13 cookers through pipes that ran across the roof of the kitchen.

Huge cauldrons sat empty in a corner, which are used as a backup when food needs to be cooked on stoves.

A woman and two men handled rice with a ladle and packed it into clean steel containers. None of them wore gloves during the process. Mr. Singh explained that the government-authorized agency, which conducts regular inspections in the kitchen, had advised against the use of gloves. The steam-heavy operations causes the temperature in the kitchen to soar, he said, and plastic disposable gloves could make hands sweaty, increasing the chances that sweat could drip into cooked food.

In another section of the kitchen, women were cleaning the dishes through a three-fold process. First, the dirty dishes were washed with water, then dipped into a basin filled with soap and finally drowned into another basin of water treated with potassium permanganate, before setting the utensils aside to dry. The kitchen floor looked clean, with one woman mopping it religiously.

The level of hygiene maintained in a centralized kitchen seems to be more of a personal choice as there are no strict government standards for cleanliness. However, a sample of the food from the kitchen is tested in a government-authorized laboratory five times a month, Mrs. Kaur said.

Most of the staff at Stri Shakti is recruited from the neighboring areas. The nongovernmental agency has formed self-help groups comprising 10 women each, who divvy up the daily tasks in the kitchen. Each group earns approximately 30,000 rupees, or $504, at the end of a month.

The daily supplies of wheat and rice in the kitchen come from the government, but all the other ingredients including the lentils, cooking oil, potatoes (for the only vegetable-based preparation in the menu) and condiments are bought by them from the open market.

The government pays 3 rupees and 11paisa (5 U.S. cents) to the nongovernmental agencies for every child they feed.

According to the nutritional requirements set by the government every child is supposed to gain 450 calories from a meal that should include 12-15 grams of protein as well. A rice-based lunch is about 250 grams and a wheat-based one has to be 200 grams.

Uma Sharma, 35, a kitchen supervisor, works from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. every day. She has been with the organization for five years. “I love to ensure that kids get clean food,” she said.

Courtesy of Pamposh Raina Workers at the Stri Shakti kitchen loading containers filled with food to be dispatched to schools across Delhi.

Yet there have been days when the supplies from the government have been late or the quality of the grains has been poor.

“We pay from our own pocket when the government does not provide the food supplies on time,” Mrs. Kaur said.

Until 2003 the government schools in Delhi offered only dry food like roasted chickpeas and biscuits to schoolchildren, she said, but even the current meals provided by the government are not nutritious enough. The government needs to provide more money so that more nutrition can be given to children, she added.

“I have two children of my own who studied in a boarding school, and when they would complain about food being served in their hostel, I didn't like it,” she said. “This job is my way of making up for it.”

She emphasized the need to improve the existing conditions in schools, which include clean drinking water and to impart better lessons in health and hygiene to schoolchildren. “If they don't get clean utensils from home, what can we do about that?” she said. “Every time children fall sick, the midday meal cannot get a bad name.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 25, 2013

An earlier version of the post misstated that 3 rupees and 11paisa was equivalent to 53 U.S. cents, the correct figure is 5 U.S. cents.