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NEW DELHI — Twenty-two children died and more than two dozen others were hospitalized on Tuesday after eating a free lunch believed to have been prepared with cooking oil stored in an insecticide container at a primary school in the eastern state of Bihar, officials said.

The children complained that the food — rice, beans and potato curry — tasted odd and soon suffered severe vomiting and diarrhea, officials said. The school’s cook tasted the food and promptly fell ill as well, according to P. K. Shahi, minister of human resource development in Bihar.

School meal programs in India, like many government programs, are rife with fraud. Corruption has long been endemic in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.

After seeing the children get sick, the school’s teachers and administrators fled the school, according to Dr. Shambhu Nath Singh, the deputy superintendent of the government hospital in Bihar’s Saran District. Parents took the children to the hospital. Seven were dead on arrival and seven others died soon after, Dr. Singh said.

“Their condition was quite serious, and we sent them to the state capital of Patna for treatment,” Dr. Singh said. But seven more children died later in the day.

An organophosphate was found in the children’s bodies during postmortem investigations, Dr. Singh said. Such chemicals are commonly used in insecticides and solvents and can be highly toxic. Insecticides are used with abandon in some parts of rural India, and poisonings and suicides from their ingestion are routine.

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“Either the food was contaminated already or it got contaminated during the cooking,” Dr. Singh said.

The local police opened an investigation and have been searching for the school’s headmistress, but she has fled, Abhijit Sinha, the district’s chief civil servant, said by telephone.

School lunch programs became universal in India after a 2001 order by India’s Supreme Court, which concluded that such programs could significantly reduce childhood malnutrition. India’s school lunch program now serves free meals to 120 million children, making it by far the largest such program in the world.

In Bihar alone, 20 million children participate in the program, which is administered by state officials.

Many states provide the food by hiring charities, some of which are linked to powerful politicians. The programs have been credited with improving school attendance, sometimes substantially. And with some surveys suggesting that nearly half of Indian children suffer some form of malnutrition, the programs serve a vital health purpose. But complaints about the quality of the food are common.

“It is a very daunting task to provide freshly cooked quality meals in 73,000 schools,” Mr. Shahi said.

Many are involved in managing the food programs, including teachers, village elders and state officials, he said.

“All these people look for easy money and there is very little scope of making money without compromising the quality and quantity,” Mr. Shahi said. “It is just not possible to taste meals in all the 73,000 schools before children eat the food.”

Mohan Gupta, of Iskcon Food Relief Foundation, a nonprofit organization that serves meals to nearly one million children in schools across central India but not in Bihar or neighboring Uttar Pradesh, said that the food programs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have long been among the worst in India.

“There are all these small N.G.O.’s there that cater to one or two schools, and they tend to be cronies of politicians,” he said, referring to nongovernmental organizations. “They are poor and corrupt.”

The episode could have national political repercussions. Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar, recently ended an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party in an acrimonious parting of ways. He is now being wooed as a potential ally by the ruling Indian National Congress Party in advance of elections next year. Mr. Kumar has long been viewed as a fairly good steward of Bihar, but this poisoning could tarnish that reputation.

Malavika Vayawahare contributed reporting.