Child hunger in Indian schools: what CBSE teachers need to know

A child who arrives at school hungry does not have a behaviour problem or a motivation problem. She has a nutrition problem, and what hunger does to a developing brain is now as well documented as any risk factor in Indian education.

Dr Anjali Menon | Paediatrician and school health researcher, based in Tamil Nadu

The scale of the problem, in two numbers

Two numbers frame this. Under NFHS-5 (2019-21), 67.1 percent of Indian children aged six months to five years were anaemic, up from 58.6 percent in the previous round five years earlier. And PM POSHAN, the government’s mid-day meal scheme, currently feeds close to 11.8 crore children across roughly 11.2 lakh schools every working day, on a five-year outlay of more than Rs 54,000 crore from the Centre. One number is a health indicator moving the wrong way. The other is a welfare programme running at a scale most countries would recognise as their entire population. Both describe the same set of classrooms.

What the scheme covers, and where the gap opens

PM POSHAN was built to fight what its own founding documents called two of India’s most pressing problems, hunger and education, with one hot meal. It works: economists tracking children through the ASER survey found that those exposed to the mid-day meal for close to five years of primary school scored 18 percent higher in reading and 9 percent higher in maths than children with under a year of exposure (Chakraborty and Jayaraman, 2019). That is a measurable return on a plate of rice and dal.

But read the scheme’s own coverage rules and the gap opens immediately. PM POSHAN runs from Balvatika through Class VIII, and only in government and government-aided schools. A child crosses into Class IX, the year board-exam pressure actually starts, and the meal stops. The Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram, the health screening programme meant to catch anaemia and other deficiencies in school-going children, draws the same line: it screens students up to Class XII, but again only in government and government-aided schools. A private, unaided CBSE school, the kind most readers of this magazine teach in, sits outside both nets entirely. Nobody is screening those children’s haemoglobin. Nobody is tracking whether they ate before the first bell. The scheme’s own paperwork looks complete. What actually happens on a Tuesday morning in a fee-paying classroom is a separate, unmeasured story.

What hunger does to a child’s ability to learn

The mechanism is well understood in the research even where it stays invisible in a classroom. Anaemia is the most common physical marker of chronic undernutrition in Indian children, and it is linked to poorer cognition and weaker academic performance, on top of the growth and immunity effects most people already associate with it. In practice, this shows up as a short attention span and a working memory that empties out by the third period. A separate study of 379 urban middle-school children in India found that regular breakfast-eaters scored higher in mathematics and English than the ones who skipped it (Gajre et al.). A child who hasn’t eaten isn’t choosing to underperform, and no classroom-management technique changes that.

Four things a school can do without waiting for the system

A school does not need the state to fix nutrition policy before it can act.

Know which children, specifically. A teacher who has noticed that one child goes quiet and unfocused every Monday, or every day after the third period, holds more useful information than any district survey. A quiet, private question, “has breakfast at home become irregular,” works better than a general announcement to the class. Watch for children who linger near the lunch queue before it opens, or who ask for the nurse more often than their classmates do.

Act at the school level, immediately. A short breakfast window before the first bell, even just biscuits and a banana kept in the staff room for the two or three children a teacher has flagged, changes a morning. Some schools have simply moved their toughest subject out of period one for the younger grades, on the plain logic that a hungry seven-year-old cannot manage fractions at eight in the morning no matter how good the teaching is. None of this needs a line in the school budget. It needs a teacher who notices and a principal who says yes without a committee meeting.

Bring the family in as a partner, not a suspect. A phone call home framed as concern, “your child seemed low on energy today, is everything alright,” opens a conversation a formal letter never will. Since RBSK’s own screening machinery doesn’t reach private campuses, the nearest primary health centre is the practical fallback. It can test a child’s haemoglobin free of cost, and getting there takes a five-minute conversation with a parent, not a referral system.

Train teachers to recognise what they are actually looking at. A twenty-minute staff session on the visible signs of iron deficiency and chronic hunger, run once a term by the school nurse or a visiting paediatrician, does more for early identification than any circular from the education department. Schools that keep this conversation running among teachers, rather than treating it as a one-time compliance box, catch more children earlier.

The Rs 54,000 crore scheme will keep moving at the pace government programmes move at, and it will keep stopping at Class VIII and at the government-school gate regardless of what any one teacher does. What moves faster is what a teacher decides to notice on a Tuesday morning, and what she does about it before the bell for period two.

WHAT TO DO:

• This week, note the names of two or three children whose energy or attention dips in a pattern, and check quietly whether breakfast is the common thread.
• Share the pattern with your headmaster and propose one specific fix, a breakfast basket for flagged children or moving a demanding subject out of period one, rather than a general request to “look into the issue.”
• Find the one colleague who already keeps biscuits in a drawer or already calls parents about this, and ask exactly what they do and how they decide who needs it.
• Pull your state’s NFHS-5 fact sheet from rchiips.org, or your state’s ASER report from the ASER Centre website, and share one specific figure with your staff group this week.
• Put a date four weeks out in your diary to check whether the children from step one are showing any change, and adjust the response if they aren’t.