Aadhaar-for-food can’t be a mandatory requirement
Prioritise universal access of food grains since those dying of starvation are mainly the marginalised
Forty-four-year-old mother, Amir Jahan, epitomised gallantry this Republic Day. There was not a morsel of food at home. So, while the nation celebrated, she borrowed six rotis and distributed them equally among her three daughters, though she hadn’t eaten for four days. That night Amir died of starvation. In January, there have been four similar deaths across India.
Four years after the enactment of the National Food Security Act, these hunger deaths are nothing short of criminal negligence by the central and state governments. The food law spells out that three of every four rural homes are entitled to subsidised food grains. Alternatively, states are obliged to pay every excluded family compensatory ‘food security allowance’. In fact, most of these poorest of the poor families should have been included in the Antyodaya Anna Yojana. But this has not been the case.
Over the last three years, more than 30 starvation deaths have been reported. Many more may be undocumented. Most of these tragedies have occurred in Jharkhand, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar. That apart, in Maharashtra, an estimated 17,000 toddlers died due to malnutrition two years ago in tribal Palghar. Madhya Pradesh is another state where child nutritional rehabilitation centres are inadequate.
Clear patterns are also visible on these hunger frontlines. About 75% of the victims are Dalits, adivasis or Muslims. The elderly and children are more vulnerable. Of the adults, two-thirds are men, and among women most are widows. Most of these deaths have occurred due to the denial of basic rights — food grains, pensions and work.
Jharkhand has recently emerged as the starvation capital. Since the mandatory imposition of Aadhaar to purchase subsidised food grains in 2017, seven starvation deaths have occurred. Now any family without an Aadhaar number is vulnerable to being stripped of multiple survival lifelines. The winding queues outside ration shops for biometric authentication are equally worrying. In Delhi alone 25,000 families have been denied food grains due to frequent machine breakdowns and fingerprint mismatches.
The Supreme Court is hearing a swathe of petitions challenging Aadhaar. Another petition has also been filed on the number of starvation deaths. But even before these final verdicts, the Union government must pull the plug on the Aadhaar authentication at ration shops to save lives. Since the majority of these deaths are among marginalised communities, the State must also prioritise their universal access to food grains. There is a famous anecdote from the life of Thomas Alva Edison, the scientist, who has the historic credit of having the most number of the patents in inventions. It’s said that he had failed more than one thousand times while inventing the electric bulb. When asked by his friends whether he thinks those thousand failures were wastage of time or not, he says, “No. Those failures taught me that an electric bulb cannot be produced with the help of those over one