Eggless Welfare: Caste, Malnutrition, and the Politics of Public Education

When the newly elected BJP government in West Bengal outsourced the state’s previously government-run midday meal program to the Akshaya Patra Foundation – the NGO wing of ISKCON, which prides in forbidding the consumption of foods that contain or were prepared in vessels containing onions, garlic, meat and eggs, etc. – the subsequent removal of eggs from the menu for schoolchildren provoked a strong backlash from progressive civil society members. “Vegetarian” defenders of the decision argued that Akshaya Patra would replace eggs with soy nuggets and paneer, both of which contain more protein per 100 grams than eggs. However, this defense was clearly incorrect and more ridiculous for reasons, unlike either soy or paneer, eggs provide all essential amino acids in optimal proportions, as well as micronutrients such as vitamin B12, iron, and choline – that are especially critical for the brain development of children who depend on the midday meal as their primary source of balanced nutrition.

One issue inadequately addressed in the discussions surrounding the issue was how caste played a role in snatching away eggs from the children’s plates. But what is the need for our urgent attention on the caste politics of food? The immediate answer is that the denial of eggs to government school students is not just about food but also about education. The government in power as well as Akshaya Patra chiefs know very well the importance of a balanced diet in a child’s brain development as well as the importance of having a healthy meal in being able to pay attention in class and learn. It becomes evident, therefore, that the decision to deprive the children of their easily digestible, vitamin- and protein-rich food stemmed less from ignorance than from malice. The analogy of Dronacharya demanding Eklavya’s thumb fits perfectly in this scenario. Just as recognizing the importance of Eklavya’s thumb in archery, Dronacharya disabled Eklavya by taking away his right thumb as guru-dakshina (even though Dronacharya would never have mentored the boy) in the same manner, our present regime – despite actively contributing to dismantling our public education sector and thereby only adding further obstacles to the learning challenges faced by children from marginalized communities – is actively seeking to disable our country’s impoverished children, by inhibiting their brain development, which is tantamount to taking away a section of their brain as guru-dakshina.

However, coming back to the question of why talk about caste, a more fundamental answer is that an analytical framework that includes caste helps in understanding a wider range of social phenomena – particularly if they are, and often they tend to be, manifestations of the same underlying cause – that we might otherwise try to analyse in isolation and risk coming up with an incomplete or inverted or misleading understanding especially when we are embedded in the dominant discourse that portrays casteist actions as neutral and justified.

For example, a common justification for malnutrition in India invokes our country’s vast population size and the supposed impracticality of adequately feeding such a large populace. Indeed, as evidenced by the fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 37.51 per cent of children under six years of age in India were found to be stunted, 17.43 per cent underweight, and 6 per cent of children under five wasted. In West Bengal, the state that most recently removed eggs from the midday meal plates of government schoolchildren, the proportion of underweight children stood at 32 per cent, while 20 per cent were reported to be wasted.¹ It stands to reason that among poor children in rural West Bengal, these figures would be even more alarming.

However, India is far more resource-rich and has a considerably lower population density than “richer” nations such as Singapore, South Korea, as well as the Netherlands. Moreover, India produces enough food to be a leading exporter of meat and foodgrains. Therefore, it is important to note, as American Political Scientist Michael Parenti pointed out in his essay titled Imperialism 101, that “overpopulation in itself is not the cause of poverty but one of its effects. The poor tend to have large families because children are a source of family labor and income and a support during old age”. Consequently “fertility rates were lowered ... by socio-economic betterment” in places like “..the state of Kerala in India ...[that] managed to lower their birth rates by one third...[through strengthening] public education and health care, a reduction of economic inequality, improvements in women's rights, food subsidies, and ... land reform” – policies that go against the logic of caste.

Another reason for introducing caste into this discussion is that a caste-critical lens reveals a common underlying factor across several recent incidents that, although appeared unrelated, have all led to the same outcome, namely the systematic deprivation of educational pathways to upward social mobility for children from marginalized communities. For example, consider the recent NEET paper leak, which was presented in official discourse as merely the outcome of negligence on the part of the National Testing Agency (NTA) compounded by the corruption of a BJP leader who allegedly sold the leaked papers to recoup the money spent on procuring them, which had a cascading effect that ultimately forced the NTA to reschedule the examination. Many students, unable to handle the pressure of preparing again for the re-test ended up committing suicide. Perhaps the first question that comes to mind is how do we prevent leakages of such high-stake exams? However, such a question would be naive. Firstly, the very structure of conducting a centralized examination that serves as a single-window entry for any medical course across the country that is undertaken by over 22 lakh students competing for 1.37 lakh seats is bound to fail in a deeply unequal caste society where markets are hardly regulated by the state. As Balaji Sampath articulated in an interview for The Hindu: “When the Supreme Court made NEET compulsory, the private college lobby pushed for keeping the qualifying marks really low (at 50 percentile which is around 120 to 140 marks out of 720). So if a student who scores 130, qualifies NEET and is eligible to buy a management seat. However, poor and middle-class students who score 400 are unable to pay and get these management seats”. Therefore it becomes evident that the very decision of having such a centralized exam such as NEET was from its inception a means of disabling students from oppressed communities from improving their social condition through a medical education. The fact that India’s highly privatized healthcare system has only served to perpetuate social inequality is merely the other side of the same coin.

In fact, the weaponizing of examination-cancellations and rescheduling as means of inhibiting upward social mobility – that are officially reported off as isolated instances of bureaucratic negligence – are a commonplace occurrence in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which are systemically maintained as India's labour pool.² Just about a month ago, on the 25 May 2026 the recruitment test conducted by the Staff Selection Commission for the General Duty cadre in central armed police forces (including the BSF, CISF, CRPF, SSB, ITBP, the Assam Rifles, and the Delhi Police), was canceled and rescheduled at multiple centres across UP and Bihar.

Caste also served to aid in the systematic destruction of India’s public education system. As a researcher in mathematics education, I have observed for over a decade that most research projects in mathematics education including post-PhD research opportunities entail showcasing teachers of public schools as lacking in some kind of knowledge or the other in order to justify corporate-led interventions, particularly in the form of a consumer-facing tech product. Such research has only served to enable the privatization of schools, leading to education being unaffordable to a sizable population, as well as in deskilling of the teaching profession. Deskilling in this context refers to the mechanization of skilled creative work after ideologically refashioning it as a repetitive task-based role that can be mechanized.

Privatization of our schooling system and the consequent pricing-out of the majority of children – who are disproportionately from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes – helps sustain the caste based division of labour and thereby also serves class interests of global capital. Children who are priced out of the schooling system are forced into the informal economy as child labour. And cheap child labour is key to these companies’ value capture – from the extraction of critical minerals for microchips from mines at a steady low supply cost to other nodes of these companies' global supply chains. In a globalized economy, the super-exploitation of dalit-bahujan-adivasi labour (including child labour) in India supplies super-profits to multinational capitalists globally, with their accomplices in India receiving a cut for their help in value extraction through caste-based exploitation.

A second issue, which has largely eluded public attention, and which further illuminates the political and economic entanglement between global capitalism and India’s caste system is that two of the world’s most notorious and widely criticised junk-food dealers – Nestlé and PepsiCo – had partnered with Akshaya Patra to distribute vegetarian edibles to government school students. PepsiCo has been in the news for selling unhealthier versions of their already unhealthy products to India and other lower-income nations compared to equivalent products in wealthier countries. PepsiCo, as per their website, is in a strategic partnership with Akshaya Patra to supply food to children in Gujarat, the same state where PepsiCo had sued potato farmers for cultivating potatoes that supposedly belonged to a variety that PepsiCo had patented. Nestlé is infamous not only for its sugary, ultra-processed junk food but, more significantly, for its unethical business practices. Since at least the 1970s, the company aggressively marketed its sugar-laden carbohydrate-heavy infant formula in low-income countries across Africa, Asia, and South America through misleading promotional tactics that actively undermined breastfeeding by portraying their product as a superior alternative. These practices directly contributed to widespread malnutrition and millions of infant deaths that were exacerbated by the discontinuation of breastfeeding leaving mothers with no milk supply of their own.³

Political Charity and Gandhism 2.0

The removal of eggs from the midday meal, presented as a benign act of vegetarian welfare, parallels, not coincidentally, the same logic that Ambedkar, in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), decried as “Political Charity” and “Gandhism”. In the chapter of Political Charity, Ambedkar exposed how the Harijan Sevak Sangh, while ostensibly working for Dalit upliftment, functioned as a paternalistic enterprise controlled by caste Hindus. Moreover, Gandhi’s symbolic gesture of renaming Dalits as “Harijans” (a term connoting “God’s people”) deflected demands for genuine equality while leaving caste hierarchy intact. Just as Gandhi’s term “Harijan” spiritualised Dalit oppression while withholding civic rights and economic justice, the state today actively disables children from oppressed castes through malnutrition (stunting, wasting) and then sanctifies the people with disabilities with the label Divyang (divine-bodied) as though it was a work of God rather than a consequence of caste-based deprivation and dispossession.

In my (2021) PhD thesis I had coined the term Divyangization (inspired by Kancha Iliah (2010)’s concept of Harijanization) to highlight this very process that reflects a pattern across exploited groups of not only people but also the cow:

For notorious corporations like Nestle and PepsiCo, such performative-Brahmanical welfare, helps in reputation laundering as well as offers financial returns: In India, while mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) spending under Section 135 of the Companies Act is specifically disallowed as a business deduction under Section 37(1) of the Income Tax Act. However companies can channel their CSR funds as donations to entities registered under Section 80G, a category that includes many NGOs like Akshaya Patra, and thereby claim a deduction on their taxable income. This helps corporations launder their public image by associating with “welfare” initiatives, and simultaneously reduce their tax liability thereby subsidizing their philanthropy with public money.

Concluding Remarks

To recognize that caste plays a role in the systemic production of malnourishment and illiteracy of our children, the unemployment of our youth, in the high numbers of suicides of our fellow people, in addition to more glaring instances of caste-based atrocities entails first and foremost raising a different set of questions informed by a historical analysis of the issue at hand. Instead of asking, or participating in such nonsensical debates as should children be fed eggs? The bigger question that could be raised is, perhaps how has enforced vegetarianism served to disarm/ disempower/ disable the working oppressed masses of our country, and thereby helped maintain the casteist status quo?

Only through a caste-critical historical materialist analysis of ruling class practices that portray increased exclusion from access to nutrition, education and upward social mobility, as a side-effect of bureaucratic callousness can we contribute to developing a more meaningful call to action.