The egg has become the first casualty of the BJP’s promise to respect Bengal’s food culture.
During the election season, the BJP read the room — and the fish market. Leaders flaunted fish and devoured mutton before television cameras. They assured Bengalis that nobody was coming for their plates. Once the kursi was secured, however, performance yielded to policy and the new government decided that school mid-day meals will no longer include eggs. The irony would be amusing if the people paying for it were not children.
The new government has entrusted the preparation of mid-day meals in nearly 1,800 Kolkata schools to ISKCON and its Annamrita Foundation. ISKCON runs a vegetarian-only kitchen, meaning eggs will be replaced by paneer, soya, rajma, and pulses to meet children’s protein requirements. To be fair, ISKCON has done exactly what one would expect of it. It has never hidden its commitment to vegetarian food. Nor is this the first time a religious organisation has insisted on serving meals that reflect its beliefs. The Akshaya Patra Foundation has spent years defending a similar position, even as nutritionists questioned whether ideology should dictate what children eat under a government welfare scheme.A government has no business following the dietary beliefs of the institution it hires. Mid-day meals are not some kind of religious charity. They are one of independent India’s most successful welfare interventions designed to keep children in school, combat malnutrition, and ensure that poverty does not decide what ends up on a child’s plate and fate. So the menu must answer to public health and children’s needs. And eggs are a perfect solution to that. But every few years, somewhere in India, the egg is dragged into a political argument. It is too ordinary to inspire passion and too nutritious to ignore. It has survived precisely because it sits in a rare sweet spot: cheap, acceptable across much of India, easy to cook and nutritious. That’s why governments chose them for mid-day meals.Now, ISKCON’s alternatives are soya and paneer. But the two are not interchangeable with eggs. Doctors have said as much for years. Eggs have valuable nutrients. That is the science. But politics is science’s toughest contender in ‘New India’.
