Over 20 India School children were on Wednesday confirmed dead and many others left hospitalized after eating a free lunch meal prepared in the school's kitchen, allegedly tainted with insecticide.
The incident occurred at primary school in the eastern state of Bihar.
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| A father hold the body of his daughter in an ambulance in Patna, India. |
Officials said the children complained that the food — rice, beans and potato curry — tasted odd and soon suffered severe vomiting and diarrhea.
The school’s cook tasted the food and promptly fell ill as well, according to P. K. Shahi, minister of human resource development in Bihar.
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 took the children to the hospital. Seven died on arrival at the hospital and others died there after.
An organophosphate was found in the children’s bodies during postmortem investigations, Dr. Singh said. Such chemicals are commonly used in insecticides and solvents and can be highly toxic.
Insecticides are used with abandon in some parts of rural India, and poisonings and suicides from their ingestion are routine.
The local police opened an investigation and have been searching for the school’s headmistress but all in vain.
School lunch programs became universal in India after 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.
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