21 Children Die From Poisoned Lunches at Indian School

NEW DELHI â€" Twenty-one children died and more than two dozen were hospitalized Tuesday after being poisoned by an insecticide-laced lunch of rice, beans and potato curry served at a primary school in the eastern state of Bihar.

The children complained that the food tasted odd and soon suffered severe vomiting and diarrhea, officials said. After the children’s complaints, the school’s cook tasted the meal and promptly fell ill as well, according to P.K. Shahi, minister of human resource development in Bihar.

School meal programs in India, like many government programs, are rife with fraud. Corruption has long been endemic in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.

After seeing the children get sick, the school’s teachers and administrators fled the school, according to Dr. Shambhu Nath Singh, the deputy superintendent of the government hospital in Bihar’s Saran District. Parents brought the sickened children to the hospital. Seven were dead on arrival and seven died soon after getting to the hospital, Dr. Singh said.

“Their condition was quite serious, and we sent them to the state capital of Patna for treatment,” Dr. Singh said. Two children died during the transfer.

Some type of organophosphate was found in the children’s bodies during post-mortem investigations, Dr. Singh said. Organophosphates are commonly used in insecticides and solvents, and these chemicals can be acutely toxic. Insecticides are used with abandon in some parts of rural India, and poisonings and suicides from their ingestion are routine.

“Either the food was contaminated already or it got contaminated during the cooking,” Dr. Singh said.
Local police opened an investigation into the incident and have been searching for the school’s headmistress, but she has fled, Abhijit Sinha, the district’s chief civil servant, said in a phone interview.

School lunch programs became universal in India following a 2001 order by India’s Supreme Court, which concluded that such programs could significantly reduce childhood malnutrition. India’s school lunch program now serves free meals to 120 million children, making it by far the largest such program in the world.

In Bihar alone, 20 million children participate in the program, which is administered by state officials.
Many states provide the food by hiring charities, some of which are linked to powerful politicians. The programs have been credited with improving school attendance, sometimes substantially. And with some surveys suggesting that nearly half of Indian children suffer some form of malnutrition, the programs serve a vital health purpose. But complaints about the quality of the food are common.

“It is a very daunting task to provide freshly cooked quality meals in 73,000 schools,” Mr. Shahi said.
Many are involved in managing the food programs, including teachers, village elders and state officials, Mr. Shahi said.

“All these people look for easy money and there is very little scope of making money without compromising the quality and quantity,” Mr. Shahi said. “It is just not possible to taste meals in all the 73,000 schools before children eat the food.”

Mohan Gupta, of Iskcon Food Relief Foundation, a non-profit that serves meals to nearly one million children in schools across central India but not in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, said that the food programs in Bihar and neighboring Uttar Pradesh have long been among the worst in India.

“There are all these small NGOs there that cater to one or two schools, and they tend to be cronies of politicians,” he said. “They are poor and corrupt.”

The poisoning incident could have national political repercussions. Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar, recently ended an alliance with the Bhartiya Janata Party in an acrimonious parting of ways. He is now being wooed as a potential ally by the ruling Indian National Congress Party in advance of elections next year. Mr. Kumar has long been viewed as a fairly good steward of Bihar, but this poisoning could tarnish that reputation.