A tainted free school lunch in India is allegedly responsible for the death of at least 22 student and more than 24 others are seriously ill after ingesting an insecticide in the meal, according to officials.
"Recently there have been reports of lizards, snakes and worms in the meals, and of children suffering from food poisoning," The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports.
The food came from the government's free school meal program, and is reportedly the deadliest poisoning they have ever seen. Last March, two kids died in Panipat, in the northern state of Haryana, after eating a free meal, according to the National Human Rights Commission, a government body that ordered a report into the deaths.
According to WSJ, the lunch program made to "encourage poor parents to send their children to school." The elementary schools in India are given an annual quota of rice and wheat, plus additional financial grants to cover other ingredient costs, equipment and staff to provide the meals.
Srini Swaminathan, a former teacher at a local government funded school in Mumbai, told WSJ that many children refused to eat the free meals.
"They would say the food had lizards, bugs or cockroaches in it," the 33-year-old said. "Day after day they would eat junk instead of having proper food which nourishes their brain."
Swaminathan said the bland, unappetizing meals were prepared off-site and delivered to the school.
"Even if you're poor you want dignity in the food you eat. For many of the kids it was an ordeal to go and get that food," Swaminathan said.
Issues with the meals have been so frequent that the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversees the program, was asked to explore the possibility of providing pre-packaged meals because the school were not providing hygienic meals to the students.
There was year-long study of the free meals program in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in 2011-12, which investigated the quality of monitoring of the food preparation, grain storage and delivery.
"Staff had not been trained properly and lack the capacity to carry out proper monitoring," Yamini Aiyar, director of the Accountability Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think-tank that carried out the study, told WSJ.
According to the WSJ, the most successfully delivery of meals are run by local communities and mothers' groups. Some schools are provided meals from outsourced or non-profit organizations, but that has not helped the hygienic quality in the food being served.
"Food comes in in the morning, but is served at noon and can become rotten in between," said Aiyar.
