Dulari Didi Talked about how we can’t run our household on just ₹66 a day. “We are dying of hunger every day. It is better to die once’ were his words.” At the broken protest site, a designated protest site ChattisgarhSavita Manikpuri of Naya Raipur cries remembering her last conversation with Dulari Yadav.
Thirty-eight-year-old Manikpuri from Dudhawa village in Kanker district is among hundreds of cooks who have gathered on an indefinite strike at Toota from December 29, 2025, in support of their demands. Chief among these demands is a substantial increase in the monthly honorarium of ₹2,000 or ₹66 per day. Dulari, 50, of Bemetara was also among them, hours before her death on January 25.
That day, Dulari Toota fell ill at the protest site and was admitted to hospital, where she died during treatment. A day later, another cook from Balod district, Rukmini Sinha, died during treatment in Rajnandgaon. She had also participated in the protests from January 20 to 23 and returned after falling ill.
While doctors say both women who died had underlying health problems, protesters say both deaths were caused by the cold January weather. This has furthered their resolve to continue their movement, says Manikpuri, adding that they have gathered under the banner of Chhattisgarh School Midday Meal Cooks Sanyukta Sangh, a union that represents more than 87,600 midday meal cooks.
The protest began with three major demands: “The honorarium should be increased as per the collector.” dar (Wage rates) which are around ₹350-400 per day, all part-time positions should be converted to full-time, and no cook will be sacked if schools see a decline in the number of students,” says Ramrajya Kashyap, state president of the association.
He says that depending on the district, anyone who got work as per collector rates – the amount set by the labor department – got anywhere between ₹9,000 to ₹13,000 per month in that district and this was the minimum amount a person needed to maintain his family.
The association is now also demanding cancellation of the riot FIR lodged against them for taking out the rally on January 29. Apart from this, the cooks want a compensation of Rs 10 lakh each for the two people who died during the protest.
daily duties
Manikpuri has two children, a husband and a mother-in-law. Her older child has graduated from school, but Manikpuri is upset that she hasn’t been able to earn enough to send him to college. Their younger child is in 11th class and they are worried about his future.
“The situation in the village is not like the city, where you can become an electrician or work in a shop and work throughout the year,” she says. Her husband is a labourer, and the work is seasonal. “There will be work when crops have to be harvested, or when there is construction work,” she says. He earns only about ₹250 a day.
Manikpuri wakes up at 4 a.m. and cooks food for the entire family, packs the food, then sends her son to school. She would walk to her school around 9:30 in the morning, about a kilometer away from where she lives.
“The job of a cook is not just to cook and serve food; we also have to do a lot of other work before and after,” she says. He and two other cooks open the gates of the school, open all the rooms and clean them. One cook is assigned for every 50 students, and the school in Manikpuri has 130 students. However, sometimes, a single cook may have to prepare food for more than the prescribed number of people, say women present at the site.
Depending on the number of children in school that day, cooks go to shops run by women self-help groups to collect ration. They clean the rice and cut vegetables, cook the food, and prepare it 10 minutes before the 1:30 p.m. lunch time. They serve food to the children and then clean up.
By the time she gets home, it’s 3:30 in the afternoon and she has to cook again. The children are hungry and her husband will be home soon.
An LPG cylinder costs around ₹1,200 and at times Manikpuri has to use a wood stove because the family cannot afford the clean fuel. Teeja Nag, a mother of five, who is a widow and posted at a school in Dantewada district, says cooks at her school use only firewood, and collecting dead wood is part of their job.
Some cooks, like Asaful Nisha of Bagicha block in Jashpur district, say the duty chart also includes growing vegetables and maintaining gardens within the school premises. This is an addition since the Mid-Day Meal (MDM) scheme, under which most of these cook-assistants are engaged, was renamed as Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM-POSHAN) with restructuring in 2021.
As protests complete 50th day, Chhattisgarh chefs remain adamant on demand for honorarium, according to Collector dar Rates, around ₹350-400 per day, whereas now he gets ₹2,000 per month. | Photo Courtesy: Shubhomoy Sikdar
The PM-Poshan scheme, launched for a five-year period from 2021-22 to 2025-26, provides a hot, cooked meal to students up to class 8 in government and government-aided schools. It replaced a scheme that had been in place since 1995 to promote universal primary education. Under PM-Poshan, the expenditure is shared between the Center and states in the ratio of 60:40, with the central government also supplying food grains.
The duty of cooks increases on days when there is a sporting event or during elections, when they have to cook for those deployed on polling duty. These extra hours come with no additional financial benefit.
Working in school has also led to tragic stories: someone was asked to clean before meeting his dying mother, someone had to hire a replacement cook at ₹200 to attend his younger sister’s funeral.
gender boundaries
About 95% of cooks are women. Forty-six-year-old Dhansi Yadav, who has been working as a cook in his village Tatipara in Kondagaon district since 1996, is one of the few men. Since his wife passed away last year, he has been juggling many household responsibilities along with taking care of his three children.
Dhansi’s father was also a cook in the village school. When Chhattisgarh was part of Madhya Pradesh, they were employed at a daily wage of ₹15 per day. For his monthly honorarium to reach ₹1,000, Dhansi had to wait until 2011. That year, cooks began having money deposited directly into their bank accounts instead of receiving payment through school teachers or the Panchayat. Since 2011, this has been increased to ₹2,000 in phases. He told that his eldest daughter was forced to leave college due to financial crisis.
Many people work because they have no alternative. Both Dhansi and Manikpuri needed to be close to their children. She says, when she applied for the job, 40-50 people had applied. “Many others were offered this job, but they declined, saying they had families and children and could not survive on such a low salary (₹1,000 in 2011),” she says.
But there was another reason for his joining: “We started doing government work with the belief that sooner or later the government would recognize us as salaried employees. It’s not like if we work for ₹15 on the first day, we will keep working for that amount all our lives,” says Manikpuri.
All cooks are paid 10 months a year; May and June are months of neither work nor salary. In this gap, finding work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which would potentially bring in ₹268 every day for a cook, is not easy for most. First, he says there are fewer opportunities and machines like excavators are further narrowing the net. Even if there is a job, the officials refuse to give them work by mentioning their name in the school records.
Dhansi and Ramrajya have seen several rounds of protests since the 1990s. Although this led to revisions in honorariums, they were never in line with inflation and the realities of family employment.
“After one protest it went from ₹1,000 to ₹1,200. Then after another protest it went to ₹1,500, and then after another protest it went to ₹1,800. The last big protest took it to ₹2,000,” recalls Dhansi. He says most protests lasted between 15 and 65 days.
The cooks understand that their strike means the children will not get lunch. In poor areas, families do not have the resources to pack lunches for them. Ramrajya acknowledges that with exams approaching, food and nutrition are important, but the association fears that withdrawing or stopping the movement will set it back years.
“I met Chhattisgarh School Education Minister Gajendra Yadav on January 9, when he said that even without opposition, he has issued an order to increase the honorarium of the department by 50%,” says Ramrajya. He further said that the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised this in its manifesto for the 2023 assembly elections. From the stage, he says into the microphone: “No matter which party is in power, our demands have not been met.” He says, when he met the minister again on January 28, the hike was revised to 25%.
The Hindu Attempts were made to contact Gajendra Yadav and School Education Secretary Pardeshi Siddharth Komal, but phone calls went unanswered.
Lucknow-based Kailash Kashyap, general secretary of Rashtriya Rasoiya Sanyukt Sangharsh Morcha, the national association of cook-assistants, says the Center allows states to increase the honorarium, and states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala offer much higher sums to cooks than Chhattisgarh or even his home state Uttar Pradesh, where again there is an honorarium of ₹2,000. Protestors at the Tuta site argue that Chhattisgarh, as a resource-rich state, can pay more.
“I have been here for the last 31 years. If he had added even ₹100 per month every year, it would have been at least ₹3,100 today,” says Ramrajya.
