The district authorities blamed the deaths on alcoholism but did not dispute that the family had not received rations for six months.
Published Oct 19, 2017 · 10:30 am
Photo courtesy: Narasimha TV
Three Dalit brothers died of starvation in July near Karnataka’s Gokarna town after the family was denied rations for six months because they did not have an Aadhaar card, a fact-finding report by a civil rights group has claimed.
The report, by activists from the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, was submitted to the state government on October 13, three days before Scroll.in reported the death of an 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand whose family’s ration card was not linked to Aadhaar. The child’s mother told Right to Food activists that she died asking for rice.
The three brothers – Narayana, Venkataramma and Subbu Maru Mukhri – died between July 2 and July 13 in their village of Belehittala. Soon after, local activists claimed that the Maru Mukhri family, which was entitled to monthly subsidised rations because of their Below Poverty Line status, had not been given rations since December 2016 because they did not have an Aadhaar number. The men had died of hunger, they alleged. However, district officials denied the allegations of starvation deaths, claiming that the deaths had been caused by the brothers’ alcoholism.
Since there was no postmortem conducted on the deceased, the exact cause of the three consecutive deaths cannot be stated for certain. However, activists who carried out the fact-finding investigation were able to confirm that the family had no foodgrains at home when the brothers began dying in July. According to the fact-finding report, the local ration shop dealer and block-level food inspector both admitted that the Maru Mukhri family’s ration card had been deleted from the Public Distribution System list because it was not linked to Aadhaar.
In repeated orders since 2013, the Supreme Court has emphasised that the possession of an Aadhaar number cannot be made mandatory to avail of any government welfare benefits, particularly to buy subsidised foodgrains under the National Food Security Act, which guarantees five kilos of a monthly supply of subsidised foodgrains per person to two-thirds of the country’s population.
Despite this, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and several other states have made Aadhaar-linked biometric authentication compulsory at government-run ration shops. The Centre, too, made this linkage compulsory in a government order in February, and Scroll.in’s Identity Project series has consistently reported instances of eligible families being denied rations for want of an Aadhaar.
In Karnataka itself, days after the three deaths in July, Mysore district officials deleted 80,000 ration cards from their PDS lists because they were not linked to Aadhaar, labelling them as “fake” cards.
No Aadhaar, no coupons, no ration
Narayana, Venkataramma and Subbu Maru Mukhri of Gokarna’s Belehittala village belonged to the Maru Mukhri caste, Dalits who traditionally worked as farm and fishing labourers. The three brothers lived with their 85-year-old mother Nagamma Maru Mukhri and through the limited and inconsistent work they found around the village, they collectively earned around Rs 11,000 in the whole year, activists said.