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A Bihar court yesterday sent Meena Devi, the principal of a government primary school in Saran district where 23 children died after eating contaminated food last week, to judicial custody till August 5, and allowed subjecting her to a polygraph test, police said. |
Saran superintendent of police Sujit Kumar said she was presented, amid tight security, before the chief judicial magistrate who sent her to judicial custody and permitted the police to subject her to the lie detector test.
Meena Devi, the principal of the school at Gandaman village, was arrested by the Special Investigation Team Wednesday and interrogated by police officials.
According to police officials, she denied her involvement in the tragic incident in which 23 children died after eating their mid-day meal at the Gandaman village primary school in Saran.
A forensic lab report last week confirmed presence of toxic insecticide traces in the cooking oil used for making food at the school. The poisonous substance, organophosphorus, in oil samples collected from school was more than five times the commercial preparation available in market, police said.
A first information report has been registered against her on penal charges of murder and criminal conspiracy.
The school principal, who was suspended from service for gross negligence, had been evading arrest from the day of the incident, July 16.
Earlier on Tuesday, the court declared Devi a proclaimed offender. Police raided her house twice and recovered a bottle of pesticide - traces of which were suspected to be present in the school food. According to district officials, Devi had forced the cook to use an allegedly contaminated cooking oil despite the latter’s complaint that it had a pungent smell.
Meanwhile more than 300,000 schoolteachers in Bihar refused to continue to help serve the mid-day meal yesterday, leading millions of children to go without food, news reports said.
The Bihar State Primary Teachers Association said its members would no longer assist in running the government-sponsored scheme, to avoid being associated with its quality problems, and because it was not in the remit of their teaching obligations.
The teachers’ union decided this week to boycott the scheme and wanted the government to hand it over to a non-profit or other agency.