Mid-Day meal cooks stage protest in Sopore to press for demands

Sopore, Sep 1: Dozens of mid-day meal cooks working under the government’s flagship Mid-Day Meal Scheme staged a protest demonstration at Iqbal Market near clock tower here on Monday, pressing for an immediate hike in their wages and regularisation of their services.

The protesting cooks, most of them women, gathered in the busy town centre and raised slogans in support of their long-pending demands.

They highlighted that despite toiling hard in government schools every day to prepare meals for thousands of students, they are being paid a “meagre honorarium” of just a few hundred rupees per month, which they termed as gross injustice in the present inflationary times.

“We have been working for years together, ensuring children get proper meals at schools, yet our services are neither recognised nor regularised. We are treated like casual workers, government must increase our wages to a respectable amount and regularise us so that our families don’t suffer,” said one of the protesting cooks Dilshad Begum.

The demonstrators also complained that despite repeated appeals and assurances from the department in the past, nothing concrete has been done to address their grievances. They warned that if their demands are ignored again, they will be forced to intensify the protests across sub-division Sopore.

The Mid-Day Meal Scheme, launched with the objective of providing nutritional support to students and reducing school dropouts, has been running across government schools for years. However, those engaged to run the scheme on the ground continue to complain of neglect and apathy.

The protesting cooks urged the CM Omar Abdullah and the Education minister Sakina Itoo to take immediate steps to revise their honorarium and frame a clear policy for their regularisation.