11-year-old dies: Activists cry hunger, Jharkhand government says malaria

RANCHI: Uncertainty clouds the death of an 11-year-old girl in

Jharkhand

last month. While

activists

have attributed Santoshi's

death to starvation

, the administration in

Simdega

district has blamed malaria.

The state government has been in damage-control mode since it was revealed the ration card of the child's family, residents of Karimati village in Simdega, was cancelled for not having been linked to Aadhaar.

The district's deputy commissioner Manjunath Bhajantri claimed on Monday she had died of malaria, not starvation. “We constituted a probe team comprising the district supply officer, civil surgeon and project director, which discovered the girl was suffering from malaria and undergoing treatment under a local registered medical practitioner,“ he said.

He confirmed the “abjectly poor“ family's ration card had been cancelled.

Asked if the family was not receiving rations because of their inability to seed the ration card with Aadhaar, Bhajantri said dealers were, for now, supplying rations irrespective of Aadhaar linking. “The food distribution and consumer affairs department is in the process of distribut ing PoS machines to the dealers. Once that is done, the dealers won't be able to provide rations unless the beneficiary's biometrics are verified by the machine,“ he said.

Activists from Right to Food Campaign, however, have a different story . Akash Ranjan and Dheeraj Kumar, among the first to reach the village, said the family had only one ration card, issued in the name of the girl's grandmother, and stopped getting rations in February as the dealer said it had to be linked with her Aadhaar number.“Tatai Nayak, the father of the girl, is mentally unsound and the mother is far too weak to work as a labourer. Since their ration card was cancelled, the family has gone without eating for several days on many occasions,“ Ranjan said.

Balram, the Supreme Court-appointed adviser to the commissioner in the Right to Food case, said the details of the case had been forwarded to advocate Prashant Bhushan, who is fighting a case against Aadhaar being made mandatory for the delivery of essential services.“The SC, in its interim order, has clarified that no essential service can be denied to citizens by the government until a final order is passed in the matter,“ he said, “The purpose of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) would be defeated if leakages are plugged at the cost of lives of the poor people.“

The state food commission, constituted under the NFSA, has also taken cognisance of the matter, and is preparing a report.