R Laxmanan, the director of midday meal, addresses the training programme in Patna on Wednesday. Picture by Jai Prakash

A foolproof training programme has been started since Wednesday to serve nutritious midday meal under hygienic conditions to thousands of schoolchildren.

The step comes three months after 23 children died following a meal at Gandaman Primary School in Saran district.

Midday meal director R. Laxmanan said: “The block res ources persons will be given training on foodgrain management, funds flow managem ent, how to keep kitchen shed neat and clean and above all providing quality hygienic food.”

Around 600 block resources persons in a batch of 40 would be given four-day training by experts from Institute of Hotel Management, Hajipur, and Unicef.

While the officials from Institute of Hotel Management would provide tips how to prepare healthy and tasty food with limited resources, Unicef officials would guide them about the hygiene factor. The training programme would run till January next year.

Later, the block resources persons would train principals of around 70,000 elementary schools and around 2 lakh cooks.

Education department principal secretary Amarjeet Sinha said: “The midday meal scheme can turn out to be success only if there is community involvement.”

He also urged the officials to increase community participation. To have community participation in midday meal scheme, the state education department is also going to issue a toll-free number through which people can make direct complaint if they come across any anomaly in the scheme. Sources said by involving parents and common people in execution of the midday meal scheme, the education department wants to bring transparency and also to keep a tab on proper execution of the free lunch scheme.

Earlier, the education department had issued a few corrective guidelines for safe execution of the scheme — every school has to purchase mustard and vegetable oil bearing Agmark and other items bearing ISI mark, schools should reject taking sub-standard foodgrain from Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns, tasting of food by both the cooks, school principal and inspection of cooked food by senior officials during their visit to school.

Under the midday meal scheme, around 1.29 crore children are provided daily meal in 70,238 schools, which is around 97 per cent of all schools in the state.

The state is yet to overcome the Gandaman midday meal tragedy even as the school principal had been charged with murder.