Mid-Day Meals in India: A Political and Psychological Study

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_27How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Mid-Day Meal; Governance; Political Trust; Child Well-Being; Psychology of Nutrition

Abstract

Indian initiative of the Mid-Day Meal (MDM) is one of the world’s largest meal provision programs in schools. The main purpose is to reduce classroom hunger, more and more students coming for primary education and continuing the same. This system ensures trust and equity among diverse communities. The MDM scheme is also a special point of entry into the analysis of the influence of the state-led welfare policies on the governance patterns, the confidence of the community, and the psychological well-being of students. Specifically, food delivery in schools ceases to be just a place of nutrition but also accountability, inclusion, and social interactions, as well as daily matters of dignity among school kids. The current research aims to discuss these intersections by investigating the impacts of the quality, frequency, and the delivery of mid-day meals on the cognitive and emotional outcomes of students in addition to evaluating the impacts of participatory surveillance systems on parental trust in local governance institutions. The study takes the mixed-methods design by a small-town primary school located in Uttar Pradesh. The paper positions MDM as a developmental and democratic intervention a point of intersection between the legitimacy of the state and the experience of the citizens, through the daily provision of welfare. The presented model highlights the necessity of assessing the welfare systems not only due to their output when it comes to their services but also in terms of their ability to establish trust, dignity, and participatory citizenship. The research paper has ended by stating implications in placing psychosocial metrics and community accountability in the nutrition governance agenda in India under Viksit Bharat, 2047.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sakshi Singh
AU  - Vishakha Vishakha
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Mid-Day Meals in India: A Political and Psychological Study
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 284
EP  - 303
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_27
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_27
ID  - Singh2026
ER  -