Showing posts with label Indian School Poisoning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian School Poisoning. Show all posts
  • Prices of meat, fruit or fresh vegetables have soared in recent years, leaving parents in poorer families reliant on school lunches to ensure adequate levels of nutrition. However, the scheme is plagued by waste and corruption. Incidents of poisoning are common, though rarely this serious. School meals in India are usually provided by contractors. Many use substandard ingredients and pay officials to turn a blind eye - Jason Burke

It is not Sandy Hook. Nor were the victims the target of first degree intent. So the newsworthiness of the traumatic catastrophe is unlikely to attract as much attention in this part of the world or endure long after the funerals. But for bereaved families the loss and grief is still the same. Twenty five children, aged between 4 and 12, who left their homes on Tuesday morning for the school day, never again to return to the hustle bustle of their neighbourhoods. The metaphorical silence of the grave has enveloped them – they were in fact cremated - immutable in its ability to be broken. A tranquillity not welcome when one is so young and which leaves nothing vaguely resembling serenity in its wake.

www.businessinsider.com - 

I have a recollection from childhood days of hearing my mother refer to 'starving India.' It seems in some parts of it starvation is never that far away: ‘According to the World Bank, 43% of Indian children are underweight –the highest level in the world and a figure that has remained constant for at least 20 years.'

Hunger, a wolf that is at times kept away from the door by schemes like 'the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, the world's largest school feeding program involving 120 million children.' The venture helps increase school numbers, adding to greater literacy and basic skills rates as a result. A worthwhile social venture on the surface but the disregard for the consumer of the product by those determined to make profit to the detriment of all else subverts its purpose. Unbridled greed is a universal malaise that breaks out given the slightest opening in any part of the world. Avaracious food contractors in Delhi or greedy developers in Dublin, the intent is the same: the ruthless pursuit of wealth which of course they will pretend they create so that we all might share in it.

Despite complaints from the cook at the school that something was wrong with the cooking oil the headmistress ordered the meals to be served up. Was she worried about impatient hungry children or being merely indifferent to the contents of a meal she would not have to eat? The cook at least consumed the food, he too being poisoned but managed to survive.

In any event the headmistress scarpered. Fear of retribution perhaps rather than a sense of primary culpability most likely lying behind her decision to head for the hills. The police hunt for her continues.

There have been widespread protests and resentment against authorities that failed to protect vulnerable children. The state government, supposedly a replacement for a previous administration saturated with corruption, has been lambasted for not moving quickly enough to provide medical attention for the children, some of whom were allowed to return home from where they were rushed to hospitals by their parents. According to The Guardian:

The local clinic near the school lacked even basic medication and equipment, ambulances were not available and none of the monitors in the intensive care unit in the state's main hospital, where another 26 children are currently under treatment, were in working order when casualties arrived. Specialist medication to counter the effects of poisoning was not immediately available.

What chance had they? The curse of poverty and hunger had condemned them to the bottom rung in a hierarchy of patients.

Police buildings and vehicles were attacked while effigies of the state’s chief minister were burned. In a country which reportedly has large swathes of territory without any functioning ambulance service, there seems little sense in allowing cops to have vehicles when they appear to use them for no good purpose. Protestors were batoned off the streets by police, never quick when it comes to moving against rapists: the families of dead children deemed a greater threat to societal wellbeing.

There is a cruel irony in life sustenance being the cause of life extinction. In US schools the kids are shot by gun nuts; in Indian schools the assailant is poverty. The result - dead children. Yet the need to be educated is so strong that a five year old girl lying in her hospital bed said ‘will go to school once I am fine’. Even with the Taliban shooting kids for going to school or where the risk of being poisoned is substantial, the need to learn is overpowering.  Children are still turning up to school in the poorer parts of India, but since Tuesday have been refusing to avail of the school meals. They are literally starving to learn.

Starving to Learn.