-Scroll.in Minister of Food and Public Distribution Saryu Roy cited a Union Government’s circular to withdraw the chief’s secretary’s order. Jharkhand’s Minister of Food and Public Distribution Saryu Roy on Saturday cancelled an instruction issued by the state’s chief secretary on the linking of the Aadhaar card to ration cards, The Indian Express reported on Sunday. Roy’s order follows the death of a child in Jharkhand’s Simdega district on September 28...

-The Indian Express The order also pointed out that on April 6, the minister had written to his secretary asking for a self-contained report on how the chief secretary could issue such a direction. However, the report was never filed. Ranchi: Four days after questioning the directions given by the Jharkhand chief secretary on mandatorily linking Aadhaar to ration cards by April 5, state PDS Minister Saryu Roy Saturday passed an order...

-Scroll.in The recent starvation death in Simdega epitomises a much larger problem of Aadhaar-related exclusion from the public distribution system in Jharkhand. The recent death of 11-year old Santoshi Kumari in Simdega district of Jharkhand has rightly stirred the country’s conscience. The context of this tragedy, however, is poorly understood, not least because of the Jharkhand government’s obfuscation. According to the family’s video testimonies, Santoshi died after starving for eight days. Even...

During the Bengal famine of 1943-44, over 2 million people died due to starvation, diseases and malnutrition, among other things. According to scholars, the apathy of the British government was largely responsible for such a massive tragedy. Despite the enacting of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013, the situation of the downtrodden and the poor has not changed much in the country as compared to pre-Independence time. On 28...

-The Asian Age The fact is that even if India was a few notches higher, it still would be among the severe cases in terms of the magnitude of malnourishment. Do we really trail North Korea and Iraq in the malnutrition stakes? There have been outbursts of anger at India being ranked 100th out 119 countries in the latest edition of the Global Hunger Index by the International Food Policy Research Institute...