Food, education and aspirations: perceptions and experiences of India’s Mid-day Meal Scheme

In 2025, India’s Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), the world’s largest school feeding programme, completed its third decade. This paper examines how families facing socio-economic hardship perceive and engage with a programme designed to meet children’s nutritional and educational needs. We analyse primary semi-structured interview data with multiple members of sixty households (246 participants) in two Indian states (Uttar Pradesh and Goa), conducted between 12/2022–03/2023. Our findings reveal that perceptions about the MDMS are driven less by its nutritional benefits and more by how it aligns with families’ aspirations and material realities, particularly their educational and income goals. We foreground parental perspectives as a critical but overlooked dimension in school meal research, positioning parents as central in shaping the programme’s reception and effectiveness. Faced with exceedingly constrained choices, families navigate complex trade-offs between competing priorities, such as collective versus individual well-being, resource allocation between education and food, and children’s time in school versus labour.