Served eggs in midday meal: 84 students leave Karnataka school
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Bengaluru: In Karnataka’s Aalakere, parents of 84 students in a school transferred their wards as part of a protest against the school serving boiled eggs with midday meals. The parents were offended by the school, which is close to a Shiva temple, cooking eggs, according to a news report by The Telegraph.
The reports state that the students belong to the Lingayat community, which worships Lord Shiva. The discontent among students and their parents over cooking and serving eggs at the Government Higher Primary School at Tiptur block in Tumakuru district had been there for a long time.
According to Mandya MLA Ravikumar Gowda, the school teaches students from classes 1 to 8 and has 124 students on its rolls. Forty per cent of them belong to the Lingayat community, which is against boiled eggs, while the remaining belong to the Vokkalinga and SC communities, which prefer to have eggs in midday meals.
The Karnataka government offers a choice of boiled egg, banana or chikk as part of the midday meal scheme. After the discontent among the Lingayats escalated, the government decided to let the parents decide, and they transferred their children to other schools, the MLA said.
“Lingayats are devout vegetarians who do not consume eggs,” The Telegraph quoted Gowda.
The MLA added that the administration cannot change the mindset of parents, nor can it work against the law. He said that it has to be one of the three items prescribed by the government.
Meanwhile, there are reports that funds allocated for the midday meal scheme in the state were being diverted. The opposition in the state raised in the Assembly that the Azim Premji Foundation had pledged ₹1,500 crore over three years to provide eggs to schoolchildren as part of the midday meal scheme, but surprise checks on schools revealed that children were not getting eggs.