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W'sMDMA ets old opl,HTconespodent ffi;,lilifiilllitilititififftilrm [email protected]{0W:he Mid-dav MealAuthority, LIP has been hon-owed with thegold uophy n thenational awards for e-Governanceor 20ll-D fbr inno-vative use oftechnology. Theawardhasbeenmnfenedon heMDMAfor its unique nitiative- CloudTelephonyand IVRS-bapeddaily monitoringsystem.

hrtha Sarthi SenSharma.director ofthe authority andhis team membersSudhanshuTfipathi, SanjeevaSingh andRS Singhwbrepresented hegoldtrophy in the lSth nationalconference n e.Governanceheld in Bhubaneswar ecently.Lastmonth, IPMDMAreceived he runnersun tro-phy in the'Digital SocioEconomicEmpowermentlcat-egory n the second ndia digi-tal awardsceremonyat India

Habitat Centre.The awardswere organisedbylAMl -Internet andMobileAssociationoflndia.Lack of accurateand timelvinforrnation hasalwaysplagued he moniboring nfor-mation sysbem f largescalegovernmentoperations.So,the MDMA hasdeviseda dailymonitoring system(DMS),asa solution o these mpedi-rnents.said Parthasarthi SenSharma

..,.:,,.1i;.,,:..ir,., , r:ill::i:"

"Theunique innwationenvisages .systematicdatacollectionon real-time basisdirectly from thegrassrootslevel.Theeffectiveness fthesystemhasbeen demonstraedby its use n mid-daymeaschemen fIP wherein datapertainingto meals n over1,50000schools s receiveddailyj'he said.Expertsbeliethat the wstem canbe suc-cessfirlly eplicated n variouother welfareprogrammes


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UTTAR PRADESH PUNJAB UTTARAKHAND

Chetan Chauhan, Hindustan Times

New Delhi, January 30, 2012 0Email to Author First Published: 21:29 IST(30/1/2012)

Last Updated: 01:05 IST(31/1/2012)

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UP Chief Minister Mayawati casting her vote at a

polling station during the legislative council election

in Lucknow.

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Inspired by the way Mayawati government, the Central

government has decided to replicate the Uttar Pradesh

model to track mid-day meal scheme to cross-check if

children get their hot meal in schools. The HRD ministry

has decided to have a nation-wide short messaging service

(SMS) alert system to

monitor the Rs 10,000

crore mid-day mealscheme. Under the

scheme, the school

children till upper primary

level are provided hot

cooked meal once a day.

Mayawati government in UP was the first to introduce a software based

SMS system, wherein the school principal and a few parents received

an automatic message the day less than 50 percent or a large number

of school children were served mid-day meal.

The SMS was generated on basis of information on mid-day meal feed by teacher in-charge of the

scheme into an online monitoring system. The principal was required to give an explanation through

SMS and parents to verify the claim.

A senior HRD ministry official said the national system will be improvement of the UP model and nomoney will be charged from parents for sending an SMS system to the national server. A successful pilot

has been implemented in Bihar and the ministry expects to cover 12 lakh schools across India by June

this year.

Every school will have to feed information regarding the mid-day meal served to children every day and

the type of food. They will be required to provide details about the quantity of food-grains they received

and the amount used.

The entire information generated would be in public domain on the new mid-day meal website. It will

help in curbing corruption and ensure that children get good quality food, HRD minister Kapil Sibal said,

after launching the website on which the mid-day meal scheme information will be available.

The UPA government has been critical of UP government over implementation of Central schemes and

had detected irregularities in National Rural Health Mission and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural

Employment Guarantee Scheme. But, the government had no problem in adopting a UPs innovation.

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UP PUN UK MN GOA

result tally

Alliance Leads+Wins Seats Won

SP 224 224

BSP 80 80

BJP 47 47

Congress+ 37 37

Others 15 15

Total seats: 403

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Mayawati has done many good things to cheer for UP People in her full five term. Few are like as below:

1. No Gunda gardi at all, No Regional netagiri....at all2. Recruitment process got transperent like in teacher recruitment, Police recruitment etc. No nepotism, favourism,

castism or no bribe at all

3. Before 2007 UPs GDP was 4.5....Now UP's GDP is aprox 7.5/8 in line with National GDP..very good progress

4. Agricultural production was at #1...i.e in good position ...Sugar prices for farmers much higher than National

5. Infrastructure developments, Electrification improved much, Education quality improved in UP. She introduced

English in Gvt Schools from Basic classes

6. Last but not least She did work for all sections of society...i mean for Sarv Jan

There are many more..endless good work done by Mayawati. First realise...Be a nutral observer...then you will come

to know that really Mayawati did much better then previous governments. Hope UP will continue such progress in

comming years.

Very good information about this goverment. I like most the job process of this goverment.

Mayawati for Prime Minister post. She is a trail blazer and will introduce innovative, unique and fool proof

technologies to fight, not only corruption, but every aspect of India's concern. Please, I request everyone voting in

upcoming elections, to vote for her. She is GREAT. Next Prime Minister of India. Congress, BJP and others have no

imagination or idea as to how they should move India forward. They are vacouos and ignorant. Rahul Gandhi only

visits the poor at times of election. For the rest of his term, he is travelling to holiday spot along with Montek

and other members of Congress party. Mired in miasma of their apathy and coruption, they have run away from

India's poor to only pursue their own greedy agenda's. Mayawati will determindely resolve issues that India's poor

are longing for.

Innovative step to stop corruption

nice work by mayawati, congrats :)..Plz implement this system in other fields too

www.lenovo.com/in/Z570_Laptops Ads by Google

awatis food tracking system for schools gets HRD nod - Hindusta... http://www.hindustantimes.com/Specials/Coverage/Assembly-E


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Anika Gupta, Hindustan TimesEmail Author

November 01, 2010

First Published: 01:29 IST(1/11/2010)

Last Updated: 03:07 IST(23/11/2010)

Yes, free lunchesIt's noon on a monsoon day in Chirodi, a farming village in Uttar Pradesh (UP), when principal

Dilavar Hussain's phone rings.

On the other end of the line, a pre-recorded voice asks him how many mid-day meals his school

prepared today. He punches in the number and hangs up. The call takes 30 seconds.

Since June 1, more than 100,000 government school principals receive this call every day, as part of

a state technology pilot programme intended to track the government's flagship social sector

programme, the Cooked Mid-Day Meals Scheme (MDM).

The world's biggest school lunch programme, MDM, guarantees a hot cooked lunch to every student

in a government primary school.

Since it started in 2002, MDM has faced harsh criticism from scholars for having no oversight

mechanism. A May 2010 report by the Planning Commission of India found that consistent

monitoring of the scheme was "virtually nonexistent." Some NGOs say diversion of food and money

runs as high as 25%.

The new technology pilot features a programme that calls every UP school principal every day and

asks how many meals the school prepared. Officials can log into a website and view the data.

Although the programme can't fix all MDM's problems, officials say it has already made a difference

"Six months ago, if you had asked how many meals were being prepared, no one would have been

able to tell you," says Amod Kumar, former director general of UP's Mid-Day Meals Authority.

On an average, officials have found that nearly 20% of UP schools aren't preparing any meals, said

sources who spoke anonymously.

For Hussain's students - he describes them as the poorest of the poor - the promise of a hot meal is

one of the main reasons they come to school.

A PROGRAM IN NEED OF FIXING

The UP government had been looking for a digital monitoring scheme for Mid-Day Meals for

several years, with no luck.

"We thought about SMS, we thought about toll-free SMS," says Kumar, who became director-

general of UP's Mid-Day Meals in December 2009.

"When we visited villages, there were some issues with supply chain management and flow of funds

and grains," he says.

A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur (IIT-K), Kumar had earlier helped set up

an e-Governance scheme that allowed rural residents to digitally track applications.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/search.aspx?q=Anika%20Guptamailto:[email protected]?Subject=Yes,%20free%20lunchesmailto:[email protected]?Subject=Yes,%20free%20lunchesmailto:[email protected]?Subject=Yes,%20free%20luncheshttp://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/search.aspx?q=Anika%20Gupta


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Rohit Gupta and Kumar's engineers created a special technology that could feed hundreds of phone

lines into an IVR program and then into the Internet.

A separate team of software engineers created a website that could display data from these online

databases.

"The database architecture is very unique," says Rohit Gupta, director of Technosys, the company

that helped design the web site.

The UP government organised a call centre to take teachers' queries, and government workers visited

each of the state's 822 blocks to train principals to respond to the daily call. The workers also

gathered nearly 150,000 mobile phone numbers.

The pilot went live in June, two months after the contract was signed, almost lightning-fast by the

standards of any government.

"There was negligible resistance," says Kumar. "It was a pleasant surprise."

TEACHERS MAKE SUGGESTIONS

The UP government's call centre receives nearly 1,500 calls a day from teachers, many with

suggestions to improve the programme.

"An option that allows us to indicate the quality of the meal is necessary," says Vinita Puri, principal

of Prathnik Vidyalaya Mevala Bhatti-2, also in Chirodi.

Puri keeps the week's menu printed on a blackboard by her desk, so that parents know what their

children are entitled to. She says she knows students who enjoy the meals so much they sometimes

save some to take home and eat later.

NOT YET A RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Scholars are waiting to see administrative change.

"You have the number of meals being reported, but what you do with that number is also important,"

says Reetika Khera, an economist and activist who has studied the Mid Day Meal Scheme.

"You need to back that with political will and establish a follow-up measure."

Kumar says data about noncompliance goes to block presidents, who are already tightening the

screws on village chiefs who abscond with funds.

In future, he says, the programme can be expanded to broadcast the number of meals being prepared

to every member of a village, providing multiple layers of oversight and transparency.

Puri insists that the programme allows a principal a way to work around a corrupt village council or

village chief.

"Teaching is a government job," she says, surveying her students as they leave school at the end of

the day.

"This programme provides us a direct link with the head office."

Re-Imagining India is a joint initiative of Hindustan Times and Mint to track and understand policy

reforms that could, if successful, transform India's efforts at inclusive growth.

Read previous stories atwww.hindustantimes.com/reimaginingindia
http://www.hindustantimes.com/reimaginingindiahttp://www.hindustantimes.com/reimaginingindiahttp://www.hindustantimes.com/reimaginingindia


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Centre to adopt IVRS for monitoring MDM scheme

Written by Pioneer News Service | Lucknow

Monday, 24 October 2011 22:03

Taking a cue from the success in implementation of the mid-day meal (MDM) scheme in Uttar

Pradesh, the Union Government has agreed to adopt the Interactive Voice Response System

(IVRS) as designed by the state government to monitor MDM scheme.

"The IVRS is a real hit. It has introduced transparency in distribution of MDM among students in

state-run schools. Impressed by its success the Union Government is contemplating to

introduce the same to monitor different schemes," a government spokesman said in a Press

release issued here on Monday.

The IVRS' success has helped Uttar Pradesh to bag the first prize in monitoring of the MDM as

well in the school book distribution schemes.

The prize was sponsored by Department of IT, Government of India and Digital Empowerment

Foundation.

To know the ground realities in distribution of mid-day meal and text books among students of

state-run schools, the Uttar Pradesh government had introduced IVRS under which district

magistrates and Basic Shiksha Adhikaris are informed about the progress of these twoschemes through an automated SMS on a daily basis.

"Under this system principals or Shiksha Mitras get a call at a fixed time from a pre-designated

number. They are asked to key in the number of students present or whether MDM was

distributed in the particular day. Within few minutes the central server gets complete picture of

students who had the mid-day meal on the particular day," a government spokesman said.

"This also helps in evaluating implementation of MDM. The same goes with distribution of

school books. Now, DMs or commissioners know in how many schools mid-day meal was not

cooked on a particular day or how many schools have not received books," he said.

The spokesman said though MDM is a Central government scheme, the IVRS project was not

financed by the Union Government. "It is purely a state government's initiative," he said.


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Centre to adopt IVRS for monitoring MDM scheme

Written by Pioneer News Service | Lucknow

Monday, 24 October 2011 22:03

The MDM scheme is in operation in 1,53,000 government schools in which over 2.15 crore

children get nutritious food every day.


10/14

, -Sh a h i r a N a i m / T N S

Lucknow, October 28

A simple call on the cell phone of the

school teacher across the 1.53 lakh

primary schools in Uttar Pradesh is

helping monitor the states mid-day meal

programme.

This innovative monitoring practicedeveloped by the states Mid-Day Meal

Authority (MDMA) has won the nBillionth

Award South Asia 2011. It will now be

put to use to monitor a range of other

public welfare schemes in the state as well.

The state-of-the-art Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) based Daily

Monitoring System is an automated MIS (Management Information System). In the

case of mid-day meal (MDM) it makes available on a daily basis data of children

availing MDM in schools across the state.

The system conceived on the basis of an interface between computers and mobile

phones helps the MDMA monitor the mammoth task of tracking the programme inthe states 1.53 lakh primary schools catering to 2.15 crore children.

Using an out-bound dialing solution calls are placed on the cell phones of either the

headmaster, teacher or assistant teacher (shiksha mitra) from a virtual number

using PRI lines. Through simply pressing keys on their cell phone the teacher gives

information of the exact number of students who had eaten MDM on that particular

day. In case of no MDM on that particular day 0 is typed.

According to Director MDM Parthasarthi Sen Sharma, the chances of the teachers

giving false information are almost nil. Firstly because as they are not responsible

for providing the MDM they stand to gain nothing by feeding misleading data.

Secondly, the information is randomly cross checked with other teachers and the

fear of the information provided being counter-checked works at a deterrent, he

said.

To make the system foolproof a representative of the School Management

Committee would also be included in the exercise in the near future, informed Sen

Sharma.

The data is then fed into a centralised server which immediately compiles it to

provide information of the exact number of students who had eaten MDM on that

particular day in a certain district or division and those schools who did not supply

free meals. The information is available online to all key decision makers in the

district and division.

The recipient of the mBillionth Award South Asia 2011 this project providesschoolwise information access on real time basis. The mBillionth Award given jointly

by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and Digital

Empowerment Foundation is a dedicated platform to explore the latent potential of

mobile and telecom sector across eight countries in South Asia.

It is designed as an annual South Asias leading mobile and telecom award platform

leading to larger regional Mobile Congress in media and policy advocacy.

Transmission of real time data in this manner leaves no scope for data manipulation

or distortion and availability of exception reports improves efficacy and

transparency of the system.

Recently the IVRS system was put to use by the Department of Primary Educationto track the distribution of free text books to students under the Sarv Shiksha

Abhiyaan.

Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Nation http://www.tribuneindia.com/2011/20111029/natio


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Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Nation http://www.tribuneindia.com/2011/20111029/natio


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I n t e r v i e w s

Moni to r ing M id-day Meal Schem e th r ou gh Cloud Te lephony

N a m e : Amod KumarPub l i s h Da te : 01 February 2011Des i gna t i on & Or gan i s a t i on : Amod Kumar

Loc a t i on :

Amod KumarProject Director - MNH, IntraHealth

Amod Kumar, an Indian Administrative Services officer ofthe 1995 . He has held several positions at UP government,including Special Secretary, Basic Education & DirectorMid-day-Meal, Special Secretary, Revenue, SpecialSecretary, I.T. (Information Technology). On a few yearsleave, currently, he is working on the capacity of ProjectDirector, Maternal and Newborn Health Project -ManthanProject-IntraHealth. Pratap Vikram Singh finds out detailsof the project.

Can you throw light on the ICT systems deployed formonitoring of mid-day meal scheme in UP, while yourassociation with the State Mid-Day Meal Authority?

During my association with the mid-day meal authority, we developed a system to monitorthe mid day meal scheme with the help of cloud telephony. For its monitoring in all the 1.5lakh schools in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the department gives IVRS calls to all the teachersthrough which the teachers are asked for the number of students who took meals on thatparticular day. Almost1800 calls are made parallely. By evening the department gets data for

all the schools.

Initially, the teachers are informed that the call is being made on behalf of the mid-day mealauthority. It asks the teacher to punch in the number of students who were served the mealthat day. If the teacher punches in zero, he is given four reasons and told to punch in theappropriate number. The reasons are: 1.Cook was absent; 2. Non availability of raw materialfor cooking; 3. Transportation problems; and 4. Other reason. The responses aresimultaneously recorded on the website of the mid-day meal authority.

The BSAs can go to website, choose respective blocks/district and check the daily mealreports. All this is done in Hindi language. Now, the Union Ministry of Human ResourceDevelopment is deliberating on scaling up the monitoring project across all states and UTs.

Could you please elaborate on the work being done in the health sector in the state of Uttar Pradesh byIntraHealth?

Manthan Project is a $4 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It aims to improve the healthof mothers and newborns in northern India. Among other Indian states, Uttar Pradesh has the highest percentage ofmaternal and neonatal deaths in India. With a duration of four-years, this project will work with the Uttar Pradesh stategovernment to identify proven, effective mother and neonatal health (MNH) interventions, advocate at district, state, andnational levels to promote the adoption and scale-up of these interventions, and expand health care services to moremothers and newborns.

We see ICT as a vital tool for efficient delivery of health care services. Although leveraging ICT is still at a conceptualstage, we would be using ICT in three four ways.

To reach to the ultimate client through SMS, education on remedies and behavioural change.

Direct IVRS calls giving reminders about the precautions and timely intake of medicines

To educate and remind the Asha workers (the health care workers in the state) through the use of multimedia-smart

phones, which is now available at a much cheaper price. We can store a video on educating the workers and aidingthem in better counseling.

B tt it i th h ti f t i f ti t (MIS) t Th h ICT

Buy Mob i l e Phones O n l i neGenuine Products with Manufacturer Warranty. Free Next Day Delivery.

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toring Mid-day Meal Scheme through Cloud Telephony - Amod Kumar http://www.egovonline.net/interview/interview-details.asp?int


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Submitted By Dev endr a S Ingh , T hu r s day , Augus t 11 , 2011

can i get the email id of mr. amod kumar....Read More

Submitted By Moham mad W aheed , Thu r s day , Feb r ua r y 24 , 2011First of all congratulation for MrA.Kumar new assignm ent.We have seen in SItaurHow well worked on "Lokvani", Mid day meal is better in

Bihar than UP because comitment s to implements.One can visit village of Bihar & see progre...Read More

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Compilation of Newspaper and Web Articles