There has been yet another incident reported of school students falling ill after consuming contaminated mid-day meals at their school at Bhoma in Ponda. This time too like in the past a dead lizard was noticed in the ‘pav-bhaaji’ and all the 22 affected students had to be rushed to the local primary health center for treatment and were subsequently discharged.
When will we learn from past mistakes? Or rather will we ever learn? By providing adulterated mid-day meals are we not playing with the health of innocent children? Even though the wall lizard or ‘gecko’ as it is scientifically known, is reportedly not poisonous per se, it causes discomfort and other related complications like vomiting when found in the food.
But the worst part is that it has caused a fear psychosis in the mind of the school students and more so in the minds of the parents of children who consume the mid-day meals.
Time and again it has been promised that the mid-day meals would be cooked under hygienic conditions. But then such incidents of food poisoning after consuming the mid-day meals have been occurring at a disturbing frequency. One way to tackle this problem would be to provide a ‘mid-day snack’ instead of a ‘mid-day meal’ by providing packaged eatables to the students instead of cooked food.
Food items like biscuits, packaged pastries, cake slices, bread with jam or butter, etc. could be procured from the pastry shops and provided to the students.
Adelmo Fernandes, Vasco
