[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.]
By Gardiner Harris and Hari Kumar
NEW DELHI — Twenty-two children died and more than two dozen were hospitalized Tuesday after being
poisoned by an insecticide-laced lunch served at a primary school in the
eastern state of Bihar.
The children
complained that the food — rice, beans and potato curry — 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.
An 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 very 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.
The 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 by telephone.
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.
“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, he 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 nonprofit organization that serves meals to nearly
one million children in schools across central India but not in Bihar or
neighboring Uttar Pradesh, said that the food programs in Bihar and 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.
Malavika Vayawahare
contributed reporting.
