Quality of Education Among Primary School Children Receiving Mid-Day Meal : Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

This paper investigates the effectiveness of mid-day meal program on ‘quality of education’ on the basis of a ‘quasi-experiment’. A micro-level survey was conducted in Kalipahari, near the outskirts of Asansol, a small town of West Bengal, India where majority of the households work on different informal sectors. In this experiment, we have considered two types of primary schools: (i) government owned school which offers cooked mid-day meal program for their students and (ii) government aided schools administered by the missionaries in the same locality which do not offer mid-day meal for their students. 200 students of class 3 and 4 between the ages 8-10 years were considered as sample. An evaluation test was conducted among the students and their learning outcome was considered on the basis of the score earned by each student in that evaluation test. The experiment proves that the academic score of the children in government school is much lower than the students of government aided school which indicates the fact that even if midday meal has been able to remove malnutrition, and improve school attendance, it has not been able to maintain the quality of education among the beneficiaries