India's Mid-Day Meal Scheme

Many municipalities in many countries of the world struggle with the need to offer timely nutrition to under-privileged children living lives of impoverishment. Under-nourished children will never achieve their physical and intellectual potential if their daily basic nutritional needs are not met as they grow and mature. Throughout Europe and North America, economically advanced countries of the world, social welfare programs that attempt to expose children to at least one nourishing meal a day through school attendance try to fill the gap for children in targeted communities.

But in one of the world's largest countries with a population close to 1.2-billion people, school lunch programs are universal. India's Supreme Court issued an order in 2001 that the country's common affliction of childhood malnutrition must be addressed through school lunch programs. And now 120 million children are served free meals. An expensive and complex proposition for any country; amazing in its breadth and determination and social-awareness responsibility in a country the size of India.

In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, one of India's poorest provinces, twenty million children participate in the lunch program. Offering food to poverty-stricken families for their children, additionally, is a direct inducement to have those children attend school. The school lunch program is administered by state officials providing food through charitable groups which they fund for that purpose.

In India everyone is out to make money; corruption is institutionalized, and it is endemic. Everyone tries to make a profit off the system. The trouble is, there is little profit to be made; it is a costly enterprise, and the only way profit can be realized is by cutting corners. And that can be achieved only through using sub-grade, inferior and sometimes dangerously bad substitutes for wholesome food.

Early this week children between the ages of five and twelve were having their lunch in Gandamal village in Masrakh block, 80 klms from the state capital. The children began complaining of the bitter taste of the food, some refusing to eat after their initial taste. The school cook had spoken to the school headmistress, telling her she didn't like the look or the smell of a new oil she was given to use.

The school headmistress is tasked with overseeing the school lunch program and she is expected to taste each meal before it is served to the children. In this instance, at this school, headmistress Meena Devi insisted that the cook taste the food. The cook fell instantly ill. And so did the children, becoming violently ill, vomiting and suffering from diarrhea.

The children were rushed to hospital by their frantic parents, some dying on the way, others at the hospital. Twenty-seven children in total died, over two dozen others were hospitalized. The school's teachers, anticipating the rage of the villagers, fled.  And the headmistress fled, her whereabouts yet unknown. She had acquired the new oil from her husband, a shopkeeper, guaranteeing a small profit to both of them.

"It is a very daunting task to provide freshly cooked quality meals in 73,000 schools. All these people (teachers, village elders, state officials) look for easy money and there is very little scope of making money without compromising the quality and quantity. It is just not possible to taste meals in all the73,000 schools before children eat the food", said P.. Shahi, minister of human resource development in Bihar.

An organophosphate was found in the children's bodies during post-mortem investigations. "Either the food was contaminated already or it got contaminated during the cooking", said Dr. Shambhu Nath Singh, deputy superintendent of the government hospital in Bihar's Saran District. Those are chemicals used in insecticides, and are  highly toxic. Commonly used in agricultural rural India, poisonings and suicides have used organophosphates routinely.

District magistrate Abhishek Sinha believes many of the children who ate the meal at Dharmashati-Gandaman primary school could have been saved if the headmistress had tasted the food before it was served, as she was meant to do. An adult could survive such a tasting, not children with a lower body weight.

Investigators believe it was mustard oil used in cooking the meal of curried lentils, rice and potatoes that contained the poisonous organophosphate pesticides.