Patna, July 22: Education minister P.K. Shahi today said it was impossible to keep a check on the quality of midday meal served at each of the 70,000 schools across the state.

“I cannot give guarantee on food served to children studying in 70,000 schools across the state. It is difficult to stop criminals from entering a school premises and mixing poison in food,” said Shahi, once again hinting at a conspiracy behind the midday meal tragedy at Gandaman Primary School on July 16.

Shahi made the remark when he was asked if system failure or negligence of school principal Meena Devi was responsible for the death of 23 children at Gandaman Primary School.

Shahi’s statement gave the Opposition a new weapon to launch a fresh attack on the government. Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Nand Kishore Yadav said: “The minister’s statement shows he is shirking his responsibility. If the government cannot guarantee hygienic food to 1.6 crore children, how can it guarantee security of 10.5 crore people in the state?”

The education minister, in company of his officials, including principal secretary Amarjeet Sinha, iterated there was a conspiracy behind the incident. Some persons having ulterior motives are committing such heinous crimes, he said.

Asked if he was aware that the school principal, Meena Devi, did not taste the meal before serving it to the students, the minister lost his cool.

“We cannot be aware of the nature of every person. Even the food served to me or even the chief minister is not tested. Neither me nor my department is backing away from our responsibility but we cannot know the character of every person in our society” said Shahi.

The minister refused to buy the theory that the Gandaman Primary School tragedy was an outcome of system failure, claiming it was the fallout of negligence on the part of the school principal Meena Devi who has been put under suspension.

Shahi and his department officials once again tried to play blame game over the tragedy by attacking the Union government for poor implementation of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and midday meal schemes in the state. Rejecting the recent statement of Union human resource development minister M. Pallam Raju that the state government had ignored the alert on proper implementation of midday meal scheme, Shahi said no such warning was sent from the Union government on the issue.

Shahi said: “There was no alert from the Centre. Based on the survey conducted by the NGO Pratham, the Union HRD ministry had only suggested ways to improve midday meal scheme and it was not confined only to Bihar.

“With due respect, I would like to say that a person (Raju) holding such an important position should not speak in such a casual way,” said Shahi, whose official residence (3 Strand Road) was vandalised by National Students’ Union of India activists earlier in the day. The activists splashed black colour on the nameplate of the minister around 11am and demanded his resignation.