India School Meal: Lunch Kills 22 Children After Eating Tainted Food

After receiving a free school lunch of rice, lentils, soybeans and potatoes, 22 children died in India.

The school lunch was part of a program that provides poor Indian students with at least one hot meal a day. It was allegedly contaminated with insecticide, leaving 22 students dead and dozens more hospitalized, including the school cook, according to Fox News.

While it is not officially known how chemicals ended up in the school food, one official said it may not have been properly washed before it was cooked. The lunch was cooked in the school kitchen.

The school, in the eastern state of Bihar, served children between the ages of 5 and 12 Tuesday in Gandamal Village in Masrakh block, 50 miles north of the state capital of Patna. After children started vomiting, school authorities stopped serving the meal.

Children were rushed to a local hospital and then to Patna for treatment, state official Abhijit Sinha said.

Authorities have registered a case of criminal negligence against the school's headmistress, who fled when the children became ill, Fox News reported. Villagers and local opposition parties closed shops and businesses near the school and overturned and burned four police vehicles.

"Whether it was a case of negligence or was intentional, we will only know once the inquiry has been conducted," Sinha said. Investigators seized the cooked food and kitchen utensils.

The school's program has been replicated across the nation, serving approximately 120 million school children in an effort to combat malnutrition, which the government says nearly half of Indian children face, according to Fox News. And while there have been past complaints about the quality of food, this type of disaster is far from ordinary for the program.