A division bench of the Calcutta High Court has instructed the West Bengal government to provide an affidavit regarding the proposal to assign the task of serving midday meals in state-run schools within the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The court’s Acting Chief Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Partha Sarathi Chatterjee presided over the hearing of a PIL related to this matter.
The state’s Advocate General, Surajit Nath Mitra, informed the court during the hearing that the proposal was still in the preliminary stages and no official notification had been issued yet. Consequently, the division bench has given the state government a deadline of four weeks to submit a detailed affidavit on the issue.
Additionally, the division bench has instructed the petitioner to submit a counter affidavit within two weeks of the state government filing its affidavit. The bench noted that the petition challenging the proposal seemed premature as no formal notification had been issued by the state government. It suggested that the petitioner could approach the court again once such a notification was issued.
The public interest litigation argued that if ISKCON took over the responsibility of providing midday meals in Kolkata’s state-run schools, eggs would be excluded from the menu, potentially leading to a lack of protein in students’ diets. The petition also raised concerns about the potential job losses for women currently employed in cooking midday meals if ISKCON assumed this responsibility. The decision to involve ISKCON in providing midday meals was announced by West Bengal Finance Minister Swapan Dagupta during the presentation of the Budget for the financial year 2025-26 in the West Bengal Assembly last month.
