A day after the Chief Minister’s Breakfast Scheme was launched, the Telangana Congress president, A. Revanth Reddy accused the State government of playing politics even with the school-going children without paying attention to the problems in the mid-day meal scheme which already faces huge problems with a lack of basic facilities and non-payment of bills to the workers.
In an open letter to the Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao here on Saturday, he said mid-day meals scheme is suffering from problems like non-payment of bills, non-payment of cooking maintenance expenses in accordance with increased prices, non-supply of gas cylinders and poor hygiene. However, the State government rushed ahead with the breakfast scheme. Instead of addressing these key issues, the CM is doing politics by resorting to grand promotion of the breakfast scheme, he alleged.
“Your government has not paid any attention when the midday meal workers are protesting for the past few days to resolve their problems. Demands like the release of increased salary, increase in budget for the new menu, release of pending bills, immediate payment of increased wages including arrears as per GO 8, ID cards and uniforms to the workers and free distribution of essential provisional items by the government are not being heeded,” he charged.
Similarly, the management of Gurukuls and welfare hostels in the state has become worse, he claimed as nowhere is the food served according to the menu. “We often see incidents of students falling ill due to half-cooked food, water and unclean environments. We have also seen incidents of students protesting for quality food. You have not done a single review on such conditions,” he charged in his letter.
Mr. Reddy said the midday meal workers expressed concerns about how they can spend money on the breakfast scheme when they are struggling to cook a single meal for lunch due to non-payment of bills. Without any clarity on key issues like these, and minimum wage is not fixed accordingly, or no new budget allocated for the new menu, the scheme was started and promoted in a grand way, he said.
