New govt scheme launched - School children in twin districts get free milk

Pics: Spoorthi Ullal / Inchara Udupi
Daijiworld Media Network – Mangalore/Udupi

Mangalore, Aug 1: Forest minister and district incharge Ramanath Rai on Thursday August 1 launched ‘Ksheera Bhagya’ scheme for free supply of milk to school children three days a week.

The scheme was formally launched by distributing glasses of milk to children at the government school in Gandhinagar here.

Mangalore

Udupi

To fight malnutrition among children, the government has decided to provide 150 ml of milk per child from classes 1 to 10 and to anganawadi children on alternate days, that is on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Briefing about the scheme, DKMUL managing director B V Satyanarayan said, "As per the government plan, skimmed milk powder would be supplied to anganawadis and whole milk powder to children from classes 1 to 10. The powder will be made into milk and served to children."

"Around 1,431 schools in Dakshina Kannada comprising around 2,05,000 children will benefit from the project. In case of anganawadis, there are 2,102 centres in the district with around 88,000 children," he said.

Launching the project, minister Rai said, "It is an ambitious project undertaken by the state government to give importance to nutrition of children. Earlier students faced malnutrition problems. To fight against it, government has implemented various programmes.

"The Congress government under chief minister Siddaramaiah has given special importance to the poor. In order to increase attendance of girl students in schools, it has announced financial incentives," he added.

"By launching this project, the consumption of milk will increase and in turn it will benefit milk unions. For any project to be successful, collective support of people is needed. People need to be more educated and healthy," the minister said.

DKMUL president Raviraj Hegde, in his presidential address lauded the government for launching this project. "Due to the increase in support price by the government, the production of milk has increased, and this project has helped us by boosting milk consumption," he said, adding that around 75 percent of the milk has been distributed to schools already.

District commissioner N Prakash, corporator Shashidar Hegde, corporator Jayanthi Acharya among others were present.

In Udupi, the scheme was inaugurated by district incharge minister Vinay Kumar Sorake at Kaup government higher primary school.

In his address, he said that the milk scheme will benefit 33,000 children in the district, and will also prove beneficial to KMF and milk producers.

KMF president Raviraj Hegde lauded the government for introducing the scheme hoped that it would be implemented successfully.

Udupi ZP president Upendra Nayak presided over the programme. Udupi DC Dr M T Reju, taluk panchayat president Gowri Poojarthi, Kaup gram panchayat president Usha Shenoy, ZP members Katapady Shankar Poojary, Arun Shetty Padoor, Gitanjali Suvarna, taluk panchayat member Shambhavi Kulal, KMF director Jagadish Karanth and others were present.