Justice for namesake: Principal convicted for Chhapra midday meal tragedy for negligence

Patna/Bihar, August 24: India’s Mid-Day Meal programme is the world’s most ambitious free school feeding programme, providing cooked meals to more than 120 million children in over a million schools across the country.

In a country where nearly half of the children are undernourished and struggle to go to school, the programme is a weapon to tackle hunger and illiteracy.

Economists believe the programme bolsters primary school enrolment and attendance, eliminates hunger, enables children from diverse class and caste backgrounds to share a meal together and bury social prejudices, and provides children with hygiene and nutritional education. There is enough evidence to prove that the programme has, by and large, been a success, they say.

That’s precisely why the deaths of more than 20 school children after consuming contaminated free meals in Bihar state is shocking.

And even after a long wait of three years, the judiciary has failed to dispense a proper justice to the victims’ relatives.

A Chhapra court on Wednesday convicted school principal of Gandaman primary school where 23 children had died after eating poisonous food three years ago. The court, however, acquitted the husband of the school principal.

The court of additional district judge II found Gandaman school principal Mina Devi guilty of serving poisonous food and convicted her in case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The court, however, acquitted her of charges of murder, attempt to murder and criminal conspiracy.

The court acquitted Mina Devi’s husband Arjun Yadav alias Arjun Rai of all charges. The quantum of punishment would be decided on 29 August.

The aggrieved parents, however, have expressed shock and dismay at the verdict wondering how poisonous oil landed in food of their children after all.

Raju Shah, who had lost his only son Krishna (6) in the tragedy, said: “If there was no criminal conspiracy, who would take responsibility of serving poisonous food that is an established fact. Any school principal can now get away with an act of negligence and get only mild punishment”.

The children died on 16 July, 2013 after eating contaminated mid-day meal in the government-run primary school in Gandaman village in Saran district, around 100 km from here.

“Soon after the tragedy, everyone from the state government to local police officers promised to conduct a speedy trial to provide justice to 19 families, who have lost 23 children. But where is the speedy trial,” asked Ahilanand Mishra, who lost his son Ashish, while speaking to IANS.

It was Mishra, who filed the FIR against Meena Devi, the principal of the school. A forensic report confirmed the presence of toxic insecticide strains in the cooking oil used for making the food at the school.

It was said that most of the villagers blamed the mid-day meal tragedy for neglect and failure of the government.

During the last Lok Sabha polls, many leaders passed through the nearby roads but no one cared to visit the village as they were afraid to enter the village and face angry villagers.

The state government has constructed a memorial for 23 children in the village in Saran district.

Soon after the tragedy, the Bihar government announced a special scheme to turn Dharmasati-Gandaman into a model village with a high school, a public healthcare centre, a metalled road, drainage system and potable water facilities.

As with most of India’s large state-run social schemes, the performance of the free meals programme varies from state to state.

States like Tamil Nadu – where the mid-day meal began in the city of Chennai (Madras) as early as 1925 – and Kerala and Orissa have reported good results. Results in laggard states like Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal have been less than impressive.

The source of the food contamination in the Bihar school is not entirely clear yet – doctors say that they have found evidence of insecticide in the food; other reports talk about contaminated vegetable oil used in cooking. Tainted food supplies or awful kitchen hygiene could have led to the tragedy.

Whatever the reason, Bihar, one of India’s poorest states with a shoddy record in social welfare, has a long way to go in delivering an efficient mid-day meal programme for its more than 70,000 schools. Most of the beneficiaries come from poor families with an average annual income of $396 (£262) and where a third of the parents are illiterate, according to government estimates.

A 2010 study by India’s Planning Commission found that more than 70% of children in the sampled schools in Bihar were unhappy with the quality of the food served. A fifth of them said they did not get adequate meals. Three-quarters of the schools reported they did not have adequate utensils for cooking.

The study also found that many schools in the state also did not receive their food stock “in a planned manner on a monthly basis, as a result of which a few schools were overstocked, resulting in breeding of insects [in the food]”. Despite all this, more children have enrolled in schools across the state since the programme was introduced eight years ago.

Economist Reetika Khera, who has extensively researched the programme, says the Bihar deaths are a “terrible tragedy”.

But, she says, they also come at a time when the programme is steaming ahead, and “showing huge improvements” mostly in northern India, where it was kick-started following a November 2001 directive from the Supreme Court to provide “cooked meals to all primary school children”.

“When the scheme began in northern Indian I remember many schools had no place to cook, no water. Teachers would double up as cooks, and children would collect firewood. Now schools have cooks and helpers, utensils and proper kitchen sheds for the cooking,” says Dr Khera.

Even the quality of meals has improved, say economists.

In Rajasthan, remembers Dr Khera, children would be served unappetising meals of boiled wheat spiked with sugar and salt in the early days of the programme. Now the meals have become nutritious with a wide ranging and appetising mix. The state of Tamil Nadu provides a boiled egg to every child every day of the week. Rajasthan gives fruit to every child twice a week.

The Bihar tragedy, say economists like Dr Khera, is not an indictment of the programme. But it proves India needs to tighten up its hygiene (children have fallen ill in Bihar and Goa and Delhi in the recent past after school meals) and improve safety at school kitchens (more than 80 children were killed in a school fire in Tamil Nadu in 2004) to make the Mid-Day Meal a programme it can be truly proud of.