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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Denied food because she did not have Aadhaar-linked ration card, Jharkhand girl dies of starvation -Aarefa Johari

Denied food because she did not have Aadhaar-linked ration card, Jharkhand girl dies of starvation -Aarefa Johari

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published Published on Oct 16, 2017   modified Modified on Oct 16, 2017
-Scroll.in

Supreme Court guidelines have made it clear beneficiaries cannot be denied access to welfare schemes even if they don’t have Aadhaar, activists say.

An 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand’s Simdega district has died of starvation last fortnight, months after her family’s ration card was cancelled because it was not linked to their Aadhaar number, say Right to Food Campaign activists. With no school mid-day meals available during her Durga Puja holidays, Santoshi Kumari had gone with barely any food for nearly eight days before she died, they said.

Santoshi Kumari, who came from an impoverished family in Simdega’s Karimati village, died on September 28. With no land, jobs or steady income, the family is eligible for subsidised rations under the National Food Security Act. However, according to local news reports and an independent fact-finding report by members of the non-profit Right to Food Campaign and NREGA Watch, the local ration dealer had refused to give Santoshi’s family their rations for the past six months on the grounds that their ration card had not been linked – or “seeded”, as its known in official language – to their Aadhaar number.

His move followed a Central government order in February making Aadhaar compulsory for accessing subsidised food grain through the Public Distribution System. Even before that, as Scroll.in has extensively reported in its Identity Project series, several ration shops in Jharkhand, Rajasthan and other states have been denying rations to eligible citizens by insisting on biometric authentication linked to Aadhaar instead of accepting people’s ration cards.

According to activists, this is in clear violation of several Supreme Court orders issued since 2013, which state that possession of an Aadhaar number cannot be made compulsory to avail of benefits under government welfare schemes, particularly to buy subsidised food grains.

Despite this, Jharkhand continues to impose Aadhaar on citizens even more stringently. In the state’s Latehar district, a September 30 order by the district supply officer warned that people whose Aadhaar numbers are not linked to their ration cards by November would be deleted from the Public Distribution Scheme list.

“This will mean excluding a huge population of eligible citizens from the scheme,” said Dheeraj Kumar, an activist with the Right to Food Campaign in Jharkhand and a member of the fact-finding team that investigated Santoshi Kumari’s death.

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Scroll.in, 16 October, 2017, https://scroll.in/article/854225/denied-food-because-she-did-not-have-aadhaar-linked-ration-card-jharkhand-girl-dies-of-starvation


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