Thinking Allowed

Santoshi was 11 years old. She went to school, helped her mother with her chores, and looked after her baby brother. Perhaps like little girls in your family, or kids around you. Except that Santoshi’s family was very poor. And for most of this year, the only food she got was the midday meal at school. On September 20, her school closed for the Durga Puja festivities. And on September 28, as Ma Durga killed Mahishasura, Santoshi died. With her last breath, she asked her mother for rice. But there was no food in the house — there hadn’t been for days. Her starving mother could do nothing but watch her little girl slowly and painfully die of hunger.

Santoshi did not die because there was no food for her. Her family had a ration card and had earlier been living on the subsidised foodgrains they were entitled to. Santoshi died because the government snatched that food away. It refused to let them have their entitlement, for no fault of theirs. Except the huge, colossal fault of being born very poor in a country that is now too posh to care about the poor.

Santoshi died because the State, in its exhibitionary zeal to display efficiency, had decided that only those rationcard holders who had an Aadhaar card, and had linked it to their ration card, and could prove that their biometrics — like fingerprints — matched those on the Aadhaar database, would get subsidised rations. In a country where rural areas are barely touched by electricity and Internet connectivity, such technological competence is often impossible. So the poorest of the poor, those whose lives depend on the substandard but subsidised food rations allotted to them, do not get their food. Santoshi’s family is one such.

They had both a ration card and Aadhaar, and had tried to get them linked. But as one arm of the government failed to link the two, the other arm