Mid Day Meals Scheme(MDMSS)

Overview

About MDMSS

Arunachal Pradesh runs the school meal programme that the Union government re-approved as Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman, and none of the money in it reaches a household. The benefit arrives as one hot cooked meal, in the school, on a school day. No family fills anything in: a child enrolled in an eligible school in the state is already covered, and the duty to feed that child sits with the school, not with the parent.

The state's own paperwork uses both names. The reporting portal the Directorate of Elementary Education operates for Arunachal is titled Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM POSHAN), while district administrations still publish the older label, as Dibang Valley does on its Midday Meal Scheme page. Both refer to the same plate of food.

Arunachal began serving the meal on 15 August 1995 in five districts, first through the Department of Civil Supply, and the Department of Education took it over from 2005-06, according to the state's implementation report on the scheme for 2018-2021 signed by the Deputy Director of School Education (MDM) at Itanagar.

The current size of the programme is fixed each year by the Programme Approval Board in Delhi, which met on 27 May 2026 to clear Arunachal's plan for 2026-27. Reviewing the year behind it, the board recorded 2,167 schools in the state, an enrolment of 1,29,010 and an average of 1,21,844 children actually eating, which it put at 94 per cent of the roll, in the PAB-PM POSHAN minutes for Arunachal Pradesh for 2026-27.

Both of those totals are shrinking, and the school count is shrinking fastest. The board noted a fall from 2,829 schools in 2021-22 to 2,167 in 2025-26, a reduction of 662, and the state explained it as closures where enrolment had gone to zero and mergers of low-enrolment schools into neighbouring ones. Enrolment fell by 12,789 students, about 9 per cent, from 1,41,799 in 2024-25, and average coverage by about 8,331, roughly 6 per cent, per the 2026-27 minutes.

The pre-primary band is the one line moving the other way, and the board said so. Everything else in the table is a smaller programme than it was the year before.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The meal year, not an application year, is what has dates in it. The board cleared 220 school working days for Arunachal for 2026-27 at its meeting of 27 May 2026, and the minutes were issued on 5 June 2026.

Which specific days those are is not published in a form a parent can read: the state holidays calendar on Arunachal's own PM POSHAN portal carries a heading for the year and no rows under it. The reason codes further down are the only place the state names the days a meal did not happen, and it names them after the fact.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Enrolment does the work that an application form does elsewhere. A child studying in a government, local body or government-aided school in Arunachal, from the pre-primary Bal Vatika through class VIII, is inside the scheme; nothing else is asked of the family. The state implementation report counted 2,782 institutions and 158,667 children under the scheme in 2020-21, of which 59 institutions were government-aided and the rest government or local body run, which is how much larger the programme was five years before the counts above.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Classes IX and above sit outside the programme, which is why the meal stops at the end of upper primary even in a school that teaches to class XII. A private unaided school is outside it too. The one documented departure from that rule is a single private school in Dibang Valley, which the district counts among its meal schools without saying under what arrangement it was brought in, on its district scheme page.

The state's own coverage tables show how narrow the aided share is: 13,370 of the 158,667 children fed in 2020-21 were in government-aided schools, and no special training centre or community school reported a single child, per the implementation report for 2018-2021.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

For a family, nothing lapses and nothing has to be re-filed; the child keeps eating for as long as the child stays enrolled. What renews is the state's own funding cycle, and in Arunachal that cycle has been running rough.

Money reaches the state in instalments against an approved annual plan. The first instalment for FY 2023-24 arrived on 13 December 2023 carrying Rs 1,104.76 lakh of committed liability from the previous year with it, as the PAB minutes for FY 2024-25 record, and the second instalment for FY 2024-25, of Rs 681.40 lakh, was sanctioned on 27 March 2025 under the central assistance release order for Arunachal Pradesh.

Two instalments after that were never claimed. The board recorded that Arunachal did not submit proposals for the release of the third and fourth instalments during FY 2025-26, warned that the delay could choke the flow of funds to schools, and separately told the state to finish onboarding onto the SNA SPARSH payment system before funds could be released for 2026-27, per the 2026-27 minutes.

What you get

Award & benefits

What the plate is supposed to hold is set out item by item in Arunachal's own cost norm, which prices each ingredient and adds up the nutrition it is expected to deliver.

For years nothing sat beside that plate. The PAB minutes for FY 2024-25 record that the state provided no supplementary nutrition item during FY 2023-24, submitted no proposal for one, and put forward no proposal to include millets, which sat awkwardly against a scheme design that promises added provision for supplementary nutrition in tribal districts, as a government release on the scheme's approved features sets out.

That changed with the 2026-27 approval. Under flexi funds the board cleared a provision of seasonal fruits once a week for every student in the state, alongside school nutrition gardens in 694 schools, per the 2026-27 minutes. Community-sponsored meals reached 15,279 students, 12 per cent of them, in the year reviewed.

Where money moves at all, it moves to the people who cook, and it has been moving late. Arunachal pays its cook-cum-helpers an additional Rs 1,000 a month from its own resources over and above its minimum mandatory share, which the board commended it for in FY 2024-25; at the next review it recorded serious concern that only 26 per cent of the funds earmarked for that honorarium had been released, per the 2026-27 minutes.

• Improved nutritional status of children, leading to better physical and cognitive development.
• Increased school attendance and retention rates among children.
• Reduction in malnutrition-related health issues among school children.
• Enhances the concentration and learning abilities of children.
• Promotes social equality by ensuring equal access to nutritious meals for children from all socio-economic backgrounds.
• Alleviates the financial burden on families by providing free meals to their children.
• Creates employment opportunities for local communities through the implementation of the scheme.

What to prepare

Documents required

Nothing has to be produced for the meal itself, and the scheme record behind the Arunachal listing carries a document list that belongs to a different kind of benefit. Its four entries, a birth certificate, an Aadhaar card, a school registration certificate and bank account details for direct benefit transfer, describe a cash scholarship; PM POSHAN transfers no money to a family and asks a parent for none of the four. The same record files the benefit type as cash and the application mode as offline, neither of which matches a meal that is cooked and served at school with no form attached.

Aadhaar is the one document that gets asked about, and the answer is on the record: the meal is delivered in kind, an Aadhaar number may be sought with the parent's or guardian's consent, and no child may be refused the meal for not having one. Arunachal had completed biometric Aadhaar authentication for 1,11,901 of its students, 87 per cent, when the board last reviewed it, and was told to finish the remaining 12 per cent, per the 2026-27 minutes.

Step by step

How to apply

There is nothing for a parent to submit, so the practical question is what the school has to do. Admission is the whole route: get the child on the roll of a government or government-aided school, and the headmaster enters the school's numbers in the PM POSHAN MIS and reports each day's meal on the Automated Monitoring System. An average of 1,250 of Arunachal's schools, 54 per cent, were reporting on that system in 2025-26, and the state told the board the shortfall sits in border areas where the network does not hold, per the 2026-27 minutes. The same complaint, precarious to nil mobile connectivity defeating daily reporting, appears in the state's 2018-2021 report, so it is a long-standing constraint rather than a bad year.

Tracking the meal, rather than an application, is what a parent can actually do. The state's school reporting page lets anyone drill from a district through the education block and cluster to a named school, across every district listed there, and read what that school has reported.

Getting the food to the school is the harder half. The Deputy Commissioner floats a quotation to appoint a carriage contractor who lifts rice from the FCI depot and delivers it to schools, supervised by the Deputy Director of School Education and the Block Education Officer, and transportation is reimbursed at Rs 2,600 per MT of food grain under the PAB approval, the same rate the state, writing it as Rs 260 per quintal, has put on record as not adequate to cover delivery into its interior areas (implementation report). Dibang Valley describes its own chain in full on the district scheme page: the release order comes from the FCI Area Manager at Banderdewa, the grain is collected from the FCI depot at Roing, and the contractor distributes it by student strength to what the district lists as 19 middle schools, 16 pre-primary schools, eight primary schools and one private school, feeding 784 students; the school counts it prints do not sum to the total of 30 it also prints, so read the split as indicative.

How winners are picked

Selection process

No child is chosen and no list is drawn up. The nearest thing to a selection is the annual arithmetic in Delhi, where the board converts the state's proposal into an approved headcount, an approved number of cooks and an approved tonnage of rice.

Those figures are the approval, not a headcount taken in the kitchen. Arunachal's approved student number for 2026-27 was pitched at what the state actually averaged the previous year, which puts it below the roll the same minutes record, and the board is explicit that a gap like that caps nobody: a school feeds every eligible child who turns up, whatever was approved, and the state can go back to Delhi for more money and grain if attendance or working days rise.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The conditions bind the state, not the child, and they are timed. The central assistance release order requires the State Finance Department to release central assistance together with the matching state share to the Education Department immediately, and the Education Department to pass both on to schools and implementing agencies within a week, with the whole flow routed from the state treasury through the Single Nodal Account on PFMS. The PAB minutes for FY 2024-25 note that Arunachal had not been transferring central assistance with its state share inside the stipulated 30 days, and that interest is chargeable when that transfer slips.

Money released and money spent have not tracked each other well either. A Rajya Sabha reply answered on 7 August 2024 puts Arunachal's central release for 2021-22 at Rs 2,968.58 lakh against utilisation of Rs 647.16 lakh, then a release of Rs 1,707.01 lakh in 2022-23 against Rs 3,106.00 lakh utilised, and Rs 2,573.12 lakh against Rs 2,790.04 lakh in 2023-24, in its state-wise annexure on PM POSHAN releases and utilisation. Spending in one year against money released in another is what makes the pairs read strangely; the annexure sets them out year by year and draws no conclusion.

The money that pays for oversight is the least used of all. The board recorded utilisation of only 24 per cent of the funds available for management, monitoring and evaluation, and told the state to strengthen field-level oversight and spend that head on time, per the 2026-27 minutes.

Get help

Contact

The school is the first door, and the head teacher chairs the committee that is supposed to taste every meal before it is served, alongside a teacher, a school management committee member and the cooks, with the tasting entered in the school meal register, as the state implementation report sets out. Above the school sit the Block Education Officer and, in the district, the Deputy Director of School Education.

For anything the school does not fix, Arunachal runs its own PM POSHAN grievance form, which verifies a mobile number by OTP and then sends an SMS whenever action is taken on the complaint. The portal names Gyati Lailang as the state's nodal officer for the scheme and publishes ddsemdm@gmail.com as the contact address, with the phone number masked. Say what is wrong in the words the system uses, because a complaint about grain that never arrived, a cook who was not paid or fuel that ran out maps onto a code the school itself has to file.

A complaint about anything wider than the meal goes elsewhere. The Education Department's own grievances portal takes a new complaint, issues a reference number and lets the complainant track its status, and publishes the working-day windows it expects to answer within; its helpline number on that page is a placeholder rather than a working line, so the written route is the reliable one.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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