indian council of medical research - Pondicherry University DSpace ...

enrollment and reduce dropout In Tamil Nadu, children above 5 years of age
studying In schools from grade I to X are glven food supplementatton through 37 438
nutrltlous meal centers located In schools These meal centers supply 442 calor~es and
12 2gm of protelnlchtld per day at the pnmary and mlddle school level, and 511 calories
and 13 5gm of proteinlch~ldlday at the htgh school level (Anonymous 1996a) Similar
schemes are operattonal In other states also Whlle evaluating the mid-day meal
programs In 6 states considerable vartat~on In the performance indicators was
observed between the states
The enrollment status was better tn Kamataka and
Or~ssa The attendance was slgn~f~cantly h~gher and dropout rate lower In Andhra
Pradesh and Karnataka Wh~le the dropout rate was also less in Tamil Nadu Gujarat
and Kerala no difference was observed in Orlssa in the dropout rate before and after
the scheme (Anonymous l995a) In general the program functionaries and the
cornmunlty perce~ved that the program was beneficial to the children In add~t~on there
are also speclal educat~on programs that train rural girls from remote areas as primary
school teachers (Ghosh 1990)
6 3 Methodology
The following Issues were taken up
for study under the aspect of education,
Importance of educat~on, school absenteeism and school dropout Data were
collected only from the study vtllage using ethnographlc and other ep~demlologlcal
techniques Whlle the qualitative data were collected separately for Issues under
health educat~on and soclal aspects, a slngle St~ctured questionnaire was used to
collect data on all the three aspects concurrently The principles of ethnograph~c
quaiitattve methods employed were the same as that applled for health ttie deta~ls of
Which have been give11 In the chapter on health (Chapter 5 3) The data collect~on