In a government school in Mainpuri district of Uttar Pradesh, Dalit children have to keep their utensils in separate rooms after eating the mid-day meals. This is so that the utensils of the children of the upper caste do not touch their utensils. However, the school principal, who called it an age-old tradition, was suspended by the government.
The upper caste people in the village, protesting the suspension of the principal, have stopped sending their children to school. Due to which on Monday 27 September, out of the total 80 children of the school, only 26 Dalit children reached to study. The upper caste people say that their children will go to school only when the suspended principal will come back.
According to the information, the incident is of Primary School Daudapur. Where all the children study together, but they have to eat the mid-day meal in their utensils according to the caste and keep them separately. On one side of the school there is a room for keeping utensils for Dalit children and on the other side is the kitchen, where utensils are kept from upper caste and OBC children.
Mid-day meals
It is being told that when the head asked the cook to wash the utensils of all the children, he got angry and left the job. In many schools in UP, a kitchen service organization like Akshaya Patra prepares mid-day meals and supplies hot food to schools. There does not appear to be such a problem. But in many schools where the cook prepares the mid-day meal, children have both kinds of problems.
In fact, if the cook is a Dalit, then many upper caste children refuse to eat his food and if the cook is from the upper caste then he discriminates against the Dalit children. The population of Daudapur of Mainpuri is about 15 hundred. About 65 percent of these people are from the forward and backward castes and about 35 percent are Dalits.
On the complaint of the school, the education department fired the cook and her assistant and suspended the principal. Angered by this, the forward and backward caste people stopped sending their children to school. No matter how much you ask for votes in the politics of Dalits, there are many places in the society like Daudapur Primary School.