In West Bengal, the new BJP government wants to hand over school meals to ISKCON, an organisation that plans to eliminate eggs from school meals and impose a vegetarian diet. But data show a different India with most Indians eating meat or fish. Meanwhile, malnutrition and childhood anaemia remain widespread, even in Kolkata.

Kolkata (AsiaNews) – Presenting the first budget of the new state government in West Bengal, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the state finance minister, Swapan Dasgupta, announced that school meals in schools in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area will be prepared by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), with a cost increase from 6.78 to 10 rupees per student.

What the minister did not say, and what ISKCON confirmed in recent days, is that eggs will be removed from the menu, replaced by paneer, rajma, soy, and legumes to ensure a strictly vegetarian diet, in accordance with the Hindu organisation's religious precepts, despite West Bengal being the least traditionally vegetarian state in India, where a third of children under five are malnourished and nearly three out of four teenage girls suffer from anaemia.

A country that calls itself vegetarian but is not

India has the largest absolute number of vegetarians in the world, but that does not mean that it is a vegetarian country. What is true is that diet is increasingly becoming a defining trait of India's identity.

In a 2021 study based on nearly 30,000 interviews in 17 languages, the Pew Research Center found that 39 per cent of Indian adults define themselves as "vegetarian”, the highest figure in the world. This also means that 61 per cent of Indian adults do not consider themselves vegetarian. However, the definition of "vegetarian" was left to respondents.

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the large demographic survey conducted by the Indian government every five years on hundreds of thousands of families, uses a different and more reliable methodology: It asks people what they actually eat, not how they define themselves. And the results are very different.

According to the NFHS-5, conducted between 2019 and 2021 based on a sample of 636,699 households, only 16.6 per cent of men aged 15 to 49 had never consumed fish, meat, or chicken, a decline from the 21.6 per cent recorded in the NFHS-4 (2015-16). For women in the same age group, the percentage of those who had never consumed these foods was 29.4 per cent in 2019-21.

In other words, 83.4 per cent of men and 70.6 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 consumed animal protein, a trend that is increasing over the previous survey (78.4 per cent of men and 70.8 per cent of women in the NFHS-4).

The gap between self-identification (as indicated in the Pew research) and actual consumption (as noted by the NFHS) is not a statistical anomaly, but rather a reflection of a country where vegetarianism has become a political and identity-defining factor due to the BJP's ultranationalist propaganda, which promotes vegetarianism as a Hindu value.

In recent years, armed groups have attacked and killed people (mostly Muslims) suspected of transporting cattle.

Anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan and economist Suraj Jacob argue, in a 2018 study, that surveys based on self-identification systematically overestimate the number of vegetarians in India due to cultural and political pressures. They argue that the actual figure is closer to 20 per cent.

West Bengal’s exceptionalism

West Bengal is a special case. According to the NFHS-5, it is among the top Indian states for animal protein consumption: 98.55 per cent of the population consumes meat or fish, second only to Telangana (98.7 per cent).

West Bengal also has the highest per capita expenditure on non-vegetarian food: 20 per cent of household food budgets is spent on meat and fish. This figure contrasts with 2 per cent in Gujarat, 3 per cent in Rajasthan, and 4 per cent in Haryana.

Between the NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 surveys, West Bengal saw its consumption of eggs and animal protein rise by almost 17 percentage points, completely counter to the policy the BJP wants to impose and to what it said during the election campaign, namely that it would respect the state's dietary habits.

There is also a cultural element that journalist Abantika Ghosh has well summarised: In Bengal, the mixed, fish-based diet is part of the local Hindu religious identity. The goddess Kali receives offerings of rice accompanied by mutton. The goddess Durga, worshipped primarily in Kolkata, is also offered non-vegetarian food on Nabami because her married daughter cannot leave her father's house without tasting meat.

Child malnutrition data

Removing protein from children's meals risks exacerbating childhood malnutrition problems.

NFHS-5 data shows that in West Bengal, chronic malnutrition affects 33.8 per cent of children under 5, wasting affects 20.3 per cent, and 32.2 per cent are underweight.

Although improvements have been made nationwide, malnutrition in West Bengal has actually worsened over the past decade.

The data on anaemia are even more worrying. NFHS-5 shows that among large Indian states, West Bengal has the highest prevalence of anaemia among teenage girls: 70.8 per cent, up from 62.2 per cent in NFHS-4. This means that more than two in three girls are anaemic.

At the same time, more than 62 per cent of pregnant women in the state are anaemic, one of the highest rates in the country, along with Bihar and Gujarat.

Who pays the price

The approximately 80 lakh (eight million) students who benefit from the school meal programme in West Bengal are overwhelmingly from the most vulnerable economic groups.

For these children, school lunches are often the only balanced meal of the day, and eggs were the minimum guarantee that something nutritious would arrive every day, at least at school.

The national Midday Meal Scheme was introduced in 1995 with precisely this goal: to improve school attendance and nutrition among the poorest children.

ISKCON claims that its vegetarian menu will meet the parameters set by national laws, according to which meals must have at least 450 calories and between eight and 12 grams of protein.

But nutritionists are sceptical because animal proteins are more complete in amino acids than plant proteins. States not governed by the BJP, such as Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, serve eggs three to six times a week.

Then there is the issue of jobs. The previous scheme employed thousands of women as school cooks, while ISKCON boasts its automated industrial kitchens and does not allow human hands to touch the food.

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• india
• west bengal
• bharatiya janata party
• bjp
• state election
• school meals
• vegetarianism