Good move! No junk food for kids in school

The Karnataka and Maharashtra governments took the first crucial step last week to ensure childhood nutrition by issuing orders to ban deep-fried and unhealthy foods in school canteens and within the 50-metre radius of all schools in their states. Accordingly, there can be no sale, distribution, or even advertising of what’s come to be called HFSS foods (food items high in fat or trans fat, sugar, and salt), which includes chips, wafers, vadas, vada pavs, samosas, cakes, some varieties of biscuits, sugary drinks, energy drinks, and so on that are loosely called ‘junk foods’.

The Food and Drug Administration in these states indicated that school managements would be held liable for enforcement and would be penalised for violations; Maharashtra will invoke the Food Safety and Standards (Safe Foods and Balanced Diets for Children in School) Regulations, 2020. While the targeted children under 18 may protest this crackdown in ways they can, and harried households, mostly mothers, overworked to provide snacks and lunches high in nutrition, the step has come not a day too soon.

In Maharashtra, this will ensure that more than two crore children in schools will eat healthier at least once a day and be less tempted to splurge their pocket money on junk food o u t s i d e s c h o o l s . Schools are liable to report the tuck shops selling such items to the FDA; Maharashtra’s FDA commissioner, Tukaram Mundhe, went to the extent of stating that schools that violate the regulations within their premises and fail to report shops in their 50-metre radius may face de-affiliation from their respective boards.

On the face of it, this may seem an overreach, but considering that India now stares at childhood obesity as a major public health crisis, with a staggering 41 million children with high BMI values, of whom 14 million are between 5 and 19 years of age, this was necessary. Most obese children are in urban or semi-urban areas that have little space for physical activities and promote sedentary lifestyles; junk foods add to the problem. In fact, other states should follow the lead of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

The projection of 56 million children in India battling obesity by 2040 should spur serious thought and action. Countries across the world too have had to grapple with the easy availability of HFSS foods near schools; in the last decade, Chile, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Taiwan, and France introduced strict policies to restrict or ban high-calorie, ultra-processed junk foods and soft drinks in school canteens and near schools. A report by UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring (GEM) team last year sounded the alarm, flagging that over 40 per cent nations do not have regulations. Maharashtra and Karnataka are on the right track.