And, when it made news, the Bihar state government, responsible for implementing the mid-day meal scheme for children in schools, came out with the theory that the food contained poison.
On Saturday night, a senior policeman quoted from a forensic report that the meals served to the children contained a pesticide that was said to be responsible for the deaths in Gandaman village in Bihar’s Saran district.
As can be expected, parents in the area are afraid to send their children to school. It’s a natural reaction when the food served in the mid-day meal scheme, said to be the largest of its kind in the world, claims so many lives.
Also, on Saturday, came reports that 30 children in a primary school in Maugaon village in Chhatisgarh state had taken ill after eating their mid-day meal. All of them are now said to be out of danger.
There’s little doubt that state governments that can’t get their act together in feeding clean and safe mid-day meal schools in a programme to feed as many as 120 million kids every day don’t need to remain in power.
A society must be judged by the way we treat our children. Those who are prepared to feed our children unsafe food should not be allowed anywhere near them.
We can’t bring the dead children back, but governments across India can certainly put in place robust monitoring systems to ensure that the Gandaman incident is not repeated.
In the wake of the tragedy, the Bihar government has announced its decision to close down all open air schools, where cooking was also done in the open. As many as 220 schools across the state have reportedly been closed.
Whether these efforts are enough, one can’t really say. But the fact remains that anti-poor analysts in India believe that the mid-day meal scheme itself should be scrapped.
Such analysts, who believe that any measure for the poor should be scrapped in a country where nearly 270 million people remain below the poverty line, can be expected to harp on the health and safety implications of the scheme.
Their real target is the scheme, not ways and means of improving both quality and delivery.
There’s little doubt that schemes like feeding kids in school and the rural employment guarantee programme have staved off many deaths on account of inadequate nutrition in India.
Reetika Khera, who has been writing on this issue, said on Sunday that the national scheme to feed children in school began in 1995 with dry rations, but cooked food had to be introduced following a Supreme Court order in November 2001.
According to her, Rs. (Indian) 13,800 crore had been allocated in the 2013-14 budget for the mid-day meal scheme in 2013-14.
Khera also points out that in some states, dubious private parties had been contracted to supply food, but points to recent successes like Rajasthan in implementing the scheme.
What happened in Bihar was criminal. But it can’t be made an excuse to stop the mid-day meal scheme.
To the contrary, better quality of food grains and ingredients, along with hygienic cooking and regular monitoring is the only way to keep children healthy and safe in their schools.
There’s no time to waste.