Goemkarponn Desk
PANAJI: Director of Education Shailesh Zingde has informed that pending bills of 100 odd SHGs who provide mid day meals amounting to Rs 13 crore will be cleared by next week.
“pending bills of 100 odd SHGs amounting to Rs 13 crore will be cleared by next week or two as state govt has already sanctioned the amount,” said Zingde
He further said thatthe order of preference for giving Mid-day meals to students will be PTAs, SHGs, dry ration or NGOs.
He further has clarified that tender floated for supplying mid-day meals is limited only to 5,000 of the 1.63 lakh student beneficiaries.
“Self Help Groups(SHG) had difficulty in supplying meals to these 5,000 students, so the dept floated this tender,” claimed Shailesh Zingde.
He went on to add that mid-day meals will be provided to rest of the students through 8 PTAs and 98 odd Self Help Groups(SHG).
“We are not going to replace SHGs with NGOs,” he asserted but went on to caution that it will not take too long for 5,000 to turn into 25,000 if their service is good enough. Bids have been received from Goa, Karnataka, Gaziabad and Mumbai, he informed.
Most if not all of the problems and breakdowns in the implementation of the scheme in the past are attributed to such disruptions in the cash flow reported by these SHGs.
The most recent one was when 1,800 students from Canacona went without their mid-day meals in October last year.
The SHGs involved had gone bankrupt and just could not deliver the meals as their bills had not been paid by the DoE since June of that year
