“The Mid-day meal scheme has helped reduce caste prejudices among students and…

A government welfare-in-education scheme's contribution to reducing prejudice against a social group and advancing social justice can be traced along several distinct dimensions: a change in everyday social behaviour (who interacts with whom), a change in economic standing or dignity for members of that group, and a widening of access to schooling — who enrols and who stays enrolled. Explaining how a specific scheme achieves this means identifying which of these dimensions its documented, on-the-ground effects actually reach.

• Serving the same meal to children of every caste, seated together, breaks the practice of caste-based commensality that sustains untouchability — a change in everyday social behaviour.

• Employing Dalit women as cooks in many places gives them dignified, paid work and normalises food prepared by them for children of every caste, directly challenging food-purity-based prejudice — a change in economic standing.

• The scheme's food incentive is credited with a large rise in enrolment of poor and first-generation children, widening who gets access to school.

• The same incentive is also linked to lower dropout rates, widening who stays in school once enrolled.

For the Mid-day Meal Scheme, all four of these effects are separately documented, and together they span behaviour, economic standing, and access — so a complete explanation of the statement draws on all four rather than a subset of them.

• A set built only from the behavioural, economic-standing, and retention effects still leaves out the scheme's separately documented role in pulling more poor children into school in the first place.

• A set built from the behavioural, enrolment, and retention effects, without the employment effect, misses the change in economic standing that most directly confronts caste-based food-purity prejudice.

• A set built from the behavioural, employment, and enrolment effects, without the retention effect, treats getting children into school as the whole story, when keeping them there is a separately documented outcome.

Only the option that draws on all four effects together — shared meals across castes, dignified employment for Dalit women, higher enrolment, and lower dropout — gives the complete explanation of how the Mid-day Meal Scheme reduces caste prejudice and promotes social justice.