Feeding Young Minds
India's midday meal scheme has transformed lives and helped educate a generation of poor schoolchildren. The tragedy in July in Chhapra, in which 23 children died after eating a poisoned lunch, would be compounded were it to end up derailing a program that is benefiting millions of children and their families every day.
NEW DELHI – Of the many sad news stories emerging recently from India, the saddest in a long time concerns the deaths of 23 schoolchildren in July in Chhapra, the main town in the impoverished rural Saran district of the state of Bihar. The children were poisoned by their midday meals – a vital part of a government-run nutrition program in schools – which apparently were cooked in oil that had been carelessly stored in used pesticide containers. The sheer horror – parents seeing their kids safely off to school, only to have them be killed there by something intended to benefit them – is unbearable.
NEW DELHI – Of the many sad news stories emerging recently from India, the saddest in a long time concerns the deaths of 23 schoolchildren in July in Chhapra, the main town in the impoverished rural Saran district of the state of Bihar. The children were poisoned by their midday meals – a vital part of a government-run nutrition program in schools – which apparently were cooked in oil that had been carelessly stored in used pesticide containers. The sheer horror – parents seeing their kids safely off to school, only to have them be killed there by something intended to benefit them – is unbearable.