A five-year-old Dalit girl died of hunger in Latehar on Saturday afternoon, her mother told economist-activist Jean Dreze there on Sunday, the day the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown entered its fourth phase.
Dreze, who was with two other Right to Food activists at Hesatu village in Latehar, heard bereaved mother Kalawati Bhuiyan’s recall events leading to her daughter’s death.
“Bhook se,” whispered the woman when asked why her daughter Nimani died. She added that the child had not eaten for four days.
Nimani and her seven siblings had nothing to eat because there was no food in the house, Kalawati, the wife of a landless brick kiln labourer in Latehar’s Manika block, said.
The woman and her eight children lived in a mud hut with a leaking roof, her husband Jaglal worked at a brick kiln at a village named Sukulhut some 40km away. When he heard about Nimani’s death, Jagdal rushed home.
Jagdal said his family had no ration card. “I will get my wages at the brick kiln only after the entire season is over. I get to eat there,” he said.
The bureaucratic damage control seems to have already started at the local level. “The girl had taken a bath in the river on a hot day and died because of that,” an anganvadi worker reportedly said.
However, Dreze and the two activists with him, Dilip Rajak and Pachati Singh, affirmed there were enough reasons to believe the family had nothing to eat.”
Kalawati got a single instalment of Rs 500 credited to her Jan-Dhan Yojana account and some food or cash from the local anganwadi centre. “But that was not enough to the feed the large family,” the activists argued.
“There is no provision to give ration to households that do not have a ration card and have not applied for the same online,” Dreze said, quoting the local ration dealer Iswari Prasad Gupta. The family also did not get 10kg of rice that was supposed to be given to such families during the lockdown, Gopal Oraon, husband of mukhiya Parvati Devi, admitting before a local TV channel that the Rs 10,000 given by the state to the mukhiya for the purpose was exhausted.
“The poorest families are having a tough time during these hard days,” Dreze said.
