22 India student dead from food poisoning

 Local police chief Sujit Kumar said authorities are looking for the principal, who was not named, and her husband for questioning.

The students started vomiting soon after their first bite of rice and potatoes Tuesday at the school in the northern state of Bihar. Some fainted.



On Thursday, 25 people remained hospitalized -- including 24 students and the school's cook, whose accounts of the incident are under scrutiny.





Was it the oil?

Bihar state Education Minister P.K. Shahi said the children were poisoned by an insecticide that was in the food.

Shahi said the school's cook had questioned the quality of the oil she was supposed to use, but was overruled by the school's headmistress.

"The information which has come to me indeed suggests that the headmistress was told by the cook that medium of cooking was not proper, and she suspected the quality of the oil," Shahi said. "But the headmistress rebuked her, and chastised the children, and forced them to continue the meal."

But the cook denied those claims in an interview from her hospital bed. Manju Devi told CNN Thursday that she didn't detect any unusual smell and didn't notice anything suspicious with the oil.


Government standards

Now, attention is turning to government accountability over the school food program that feeds more than 100 million children -- but often with different standards across the country.

"It is just a reflection of the sort of neglect ... and these sorts of concerns in that state and states around that area," said Reetika Khera of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

"In the southern part of the country, children get not only good quality food, they also get very nutritious food," she said. "But this is not the case in Bihar."

The school meal program is run by the Indian government in collaboration with state governments, Khera said.

But she said substandard school food is "a reflection of a more general problem, which is the lack of political interest in these programs and -- very importantly -- the lack of accountability."

Education official: We're trying to improve

Shahi, the Bihar state education minister, said 20 million children receive hot meals in about 73,000 elementary schools.

We have been endeavoring to improve the quality. However, the challenge is still there because the magnitude of this program is so huge that there are a number of challenges," he said.

"Even though I would unhesitatingly admit that there are some quality issues before us, this is the first incident which has happened in the state," Shahi said. "In the past, we have received complaints regarding quality, but the incident of this nature ... has really shocked us -- shocked the entire state."

District magistrate Abhijit Sinha said an inquiry into the deaths is under way, CNN sister network CNN-IBN reported.

The children were between the ages of 5 and 12, authorities said.

Source:CNN