Parents are taking the free meals programme to the police

Sixty parents in Karo, North Sumatra, have filed a police complaint over the meals the state feeds their children. It is the first attempt to turn the free meals programme into a criminal case. The complaint went in on 31 August and was made public on Thursday. It names three parties together: the National Nutrition Agency that runs the scheme, the kitchen that cooked the food, and the schools that handed it out. At least 300 students at several high schools in Karo fell ill in mid-August, according to Fitri Sijabat, the mother speaking for the group.

What the parents are asking for is narrow. Their lawyer told Nikkei Asia that no individual has been named yet and no criminal charge chosen. The request is for police to investigate possible negligence, name suspects, draw up charges and agree compensation. The reason for pushing this far sits in one line from the lawyer: in similar outbreaks elsewhere, nobody has ever been named as a suspect, and that has built a sense of impunity. A separate civil case is being prepared for the district court. Karo police are waiting on laboratory tests of food samples and are questioning students, teachers and a nutritionist.

Behind the filing is one family. Fitri's 17-year-old daughter Agnes was taken to hospital after eating a meal, sent home, then readmitted several times over a month with nausea, itching and numbness. Her mother's request is not better kitchens but an end to the programme: why spend the state budget, she asked, if children end up like this. Reuters, whose report Nikkei Asia published, counts more than 50,000 people made ill since the scheme began, over 2,000 of them in one recent week. The programme is meant to reach 83 million schoolchildren and pregnant women and is budgeted at 229 trillion rupiah, the most expensive social programme the country runs.

Why it matters

If your child has been made sick by a school meal, this complaint shows the route other parents are now trying: one police report naming the agency, the kitchen and the school together, with a civil claim for money alongside it. Watch whether Karo police name a single suspect, because that is the test of whether the impunity the lawyer described actually breaks. A criminal file also makes the programme harder for ministers to defend when the next budget is argued over.