Online lottery proceeds will feed mid-day meals

BANGALORE: The state finance department, at the behest of Chief Minister S.M. Krishna, will be constituting a separate fund for online lottery accruals.
The amount is to be deployed towards propagating the mid-day meal scheme which has an ardent votary in Primary Education Minister B.K. Chandrashekar. The state government is expected to pass a government order to this effect shortly.
It seems Krishna has been influenced by the West, where a percentage of lottery sales collection is devoted to education and maintenance of heritage buildings among others.
Despite a Supreme Court ruling that state governments should provide every child in state-run primary schools a meal by June 30, 2002, states like Karnataka have reacted slowly.
Due to paucity of funds, the state education department has been running this scheme in only seven districts of north Karnataka.
Krishna’s decision is now expected to help the department mop up the Rs 160 crore needed to implement the mid-day meal scheme in the state. This year, the government is expected to make a profit of Rs 100 crore from online lottery, and is projected to go up to Rs 1,096 crore in five years.
In Bangalore Rural, the state plans to collaborate with Iskcon’s Akshaya Patre Foundation to implement the scheme.
The Akshya Patre programme provides one hot meal every day of the academic year to over 45,000 children across 200 underpriveleged schools in and around the city.
Significantly, the state education department and the Indian Institute of Management are in the process of making exhaustive studies on the programme.