An investigation into the death of 23 children from eating a government sponsored lunch programme was the result of storing cooking oil and other ingredients in a insecticide containers.

"You only come and do checks when you get complaints or when there are serious cases," said Rudranarayan Ram, the local education administrator for the village of Gandaman in Bihar state.

"This was the first time," he told Reuters.

The Indian Institute of Management found in a survey that school children in Gujarat were told to clean up after lunch by "rubbing the playground soil on the plates and then giving a quick rinse," said an online report

Another look into the meal programme found that grains, stored to feel children included stones and worms in them.

Children in Bihar have boycotted the midday lunch i.n protest of the children who have died and they are probably afraid it will happen again

"If the government checks, they will find that the children who have been eating midday meals are under great physical threat," Ajay KumarJha, professor at AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies, who monitors the Bihar lunch programme in Bihar said.

One of the noteworthy points Biha's midday meal programme is that it has received widespread popularity from agencies and the U.N. It was a plan that made children werego to school in exchange for a meal, often the only meal of the day.

"We need it. It's one of India's most well-thought of programs," said Bharathi Ghanashyam, a spokesperson for the Akshaya Patra, an NGO that feels school lunches lunches are a key to educating the poor.

PK Shahi, the education minister in Bihar, said the government had only provide general guidelines for the midday meal programme.

He added "there were general advisories for better hygiene. That's all," he said.

"In Bihar, the midday meal scheme covers 16-18 million children in 73,000 schools and it's run by teachers and school management committees. I can understand the issues about hygiene given the scale of operation, the number of people involved, and given the fact that the individuals who run the programme are not experts in food." said Shahi, adding. "But you have to understand that (this) is a pure case of poisoning."

"Accountability and monitoring is weak to non-existent," Suneetha Kadiyala, International Food Policy research fellow at the Research Institute in New Delhi, said in an email. "The right to food cannot be achieved (through any policy or legal instrument) unless the governance of programmes and their monitoring at grass roots is strengthened."

Apparently, the principle had been warned of a strange color in the children's food, but she ignored the chef, according to an account by the cook's relative.

After an investigation by Bloomberg, detailing the leaking of funds from the food provided to the children, the principal is on the run after reports confirm that the food for the children were taken from the principal's husband's store, reports Livemint.