Pity India's children who suffer for the greed of adults

India is a country where the best ideas rot because of venality. The latest casualty is the midday meal scheme - fine in conception, noble in purpose but often pathetic in execution, as it was last week when the children at a village school in Bihar state were fed a poisonous meal. The vegetable oil used contained pesticide.

Some of the children had complained that it tasted very bitter but were told to shut up and eat it. Twenty-three children died. The simple job of providing a cooked meal for very poor schoolchildren cannot be done because the civil servant in charge makes money by procuring inferior ingredients, which are not stored hygienically and the principal doesn't care if rats, lizards, snakes and cockroaches crawl over the kitchen-hovel where the meal is prepared.

The deaths prompted many poor parents in Bihar to shun the midday meal. You can't blame them. They know that more of their children could die without anyone caring.

But, without the meal, millions of children could end up staying away from school. The whole aim of the scheme was to lure children into the classroom - children who have often had no breakfast - through the enticing prospect of a hot, nourishing meal.

The scheme was a great leap of imagination. It started on a small scale decades ago, but grew into a leviathan; it was adopted nationally in 2001, when it received Supreme Court support, and currently feeds 120 million children.

Apart from getting children into school, the scheme has other worthy aims. When children break bread together, caste differences fade. The chronic malnutrition among India's children is eased. Local women get jobs as cooks.

After the initial success, as the scheme kept spreading, stories started emerging of adulterated food, filthy kitchens, cases of food poisoning, nepotism (in Bihar, the principal's husband supplied the food, and both are now in hiding), cheating on the quantity, and poor nutritional value.