Food politics and the MGR legacy

There’s a piping hot topic in Tamil Nadu and it’s biriyani. The new government led by actor-turned-chief minister Joseph Vijay is actively considering a proposal to introduce chicken biriyani once a week under the state’s Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme for students up to the senior secondary level. A cabinet committee is studying the proposal and a decision is expected soon.

It comes at a time when food has become politicised across India. Words like ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’ overwhelm ‘nutrition’ and ‘science’. In several BJP-ruled states — West Bengal being the latest — even an egg a day is controversial, despite overwhelming evidence that eggs are one of the cheapest and best sources of protein for children.

The proposed biriyani, therefore, is more than a mouthwatering idea. It’s the latest chapter in a story that goes back over a century, “a story of political courage, administrative imagination and an unwavering belief that education cannot succeed where children arrive hungry,” as I. Amal Raj, an educationist and faculty with Chennai’s Loyola College puts it. “Long before the language of nutritional security entered international development discourse and governments began speaking of demographic dividends, Tamil Nadu had already understood that students learn better on full stomachs.”

The tale of school meals in Tamil Nadu is inseparable from Marudur Gopalan Ramachandran, better known as MGR. When he announced the expansion of the Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme in 1982, few believed it could succeed. The state proposed spending nearly Rs 150 crore a year, an astonishing amount for that period, to feed millions of children through tens of thousands of feeding centres.

Economists questioned the fiscal wisdom. Bureaucrats feared logistical chaos. Political opponents dismissed it as an expensive populist exercise designed to convert box-office popularity into electoral loyalty.

Editorials raised genuine concerns over procurement, transportation, food safety, storage, staffing and monitoring. Naysayers predicted that leakages and corruption would kill the programme. Some argued that poor parents would send children to school only for the food. Others opined that the state’s fragile finances would collapse under the weight of such an ambitious commitment.

MGR heard all the criticism. And ignored almost all of it. Having experienced hunger and poverty in his own childhood, he understood something that economic models often failed to: a hungry child cannot concentrate. For MGR, the meal was not charity, it was the first lesson of the day. “Nutrition is not a favour extended to the poor. It is the foundation upon which equality is built,” he said. That philosophy led to one of the most influential public policy experiments in independent India.

To credit MGR alone would be to ignore history. The idea of feeding schoolchildren dates back to the early twentieth century, when the Justice Party governed Madras Presidency. The noon meal scheme kicked off in some government schools in what is now Chennai, and was later expanded by iconic Congress leader and chief minister K. Kamaraj.

However, these initiatives remained limited in scale and ambition. MGR took the idea beyond welfare and made it central to governance. Thousands of kitchens emerged across villages and towns. Local women were employed as cooks and helpers. Communities became participants rather than passive beneficiaries. Children were fed; families were sustained.

Governments changed. Fierce rivals occupied Fort St George, the seat of the Tamil Nadu government. Yet none dared dismantle the programme. Instead, every administration sought to improve it. Karunanidhi expanded its nutritional components; Jayalalithaa strengthened the menu, introducing eggs more systematically; M.K. Stalin recognised that hunger pangs don’t wait till noon and introduced the free breakfast scheme for primary school children. Joseph Vijay’s proposal follows in their footsteps.

The Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme outlived its architect because society saw it as indispensable. The real measure of its success wasn’t the number of meals served. School enrolment rose steadily among children from economically weaker families. Attendance improved because parents knew their children would receive at least one nutritious meal every day. Dropout rates fell, particularly among girls. It became an incentive for first-generation learners — who would otherwise accompany parents to farms or construction sites — to stay in school.

The scheme also quietly challenged entrenched social hierarchies. Children from different castes sat together and ate the same food. Women from disadvantaged backgrounds entered the workforce as cooks and organisers. Public kitchens became spaces where the state intervened not merely against hunger but against exclusion.

“School meals are often described as welfare. In reality, they are among the most productive investments a society can make. Every plate served is an investment in education, health, dignity and future productivity,” says K.J. Ajayakumar, a recently retired teacher from Chennai Kerala Samajam Higher Secondary School.

Tamil Nadu began recording educational and health indicators that placed it consistently ahead of much of India. While no single programme explains the state’s development arc, scholars have repeatedly pointed to the noon meal scheme as one of the foundational interventions that helped reduce inequalities over generations.

Its influence travelled beyond state borders. India’s celebrated Mid-Day Meal Scheme — renamed PM POSHAN in the Modi era — drew on the experience of Tamil Nadu. Today, it is the largest such programme in the world, serving more than 100 million children every school day.

Whether chicken biriyani eventually reaches school kitchens is, in many ways, incidental. The larger lesson lies elsewhere. Decisions about what children should eat are increasingly driven by ideological preferences rather than nutritional evidence. Eggs are becoming taboo despite their proven efficacy in addressing protein deficiency. Vegetarian menus are justified in the name of ‘cultural values’, even when large sections of poor children come from communities whose regular diets include eggs, fish or meat whenever they can afford them.

“Tamil Nadu has consistently resisted the Sangh Parivar agenda,” points out Chennai-based writer and political observer Kavin Malar. “Successive governments have largely treated noon meals as a scientific and public health question rather than a religious one. That explains why the state is debating the nutritional value of chicken biriyani instead of questioning whether animal protein belongs on school plates at all.”