Aadhaar cards

family, besides identifying patients who need surgical corrections or can be provided prosthetic aids, as well as those who need palliative care.

Seventy-four of the 84 people affected in Arai are in the Malkan panchayat, which has a population of under 2,000. Almost every householdherehasseenamarriagewithinthe family, and every sixth house has one or two disabled members, and some have up to five.

The village has no doctor at its two governmentmedicalsub-centres.thesecentresarelocatedintheothertwopanchayatsofarai,haveli and Peeran. While one sub-centre has just a pharmacist and safai karamchari, another has one dispensary dealing in ‘Indian System of Medicines’. Deputy Commissioner Malik says over90postsfordoctorsarevacantinthedistrict.

Moulvimohammadfareedmalik,36,says that after he failed to get an Aadhaar card for thefourthtimeacoupleofmonthsago,hemet Union Minister of State in the PMO Dr Jitendra Singh,whobelongstojammu.“heassuredme he would look into the matter.” Fareed, who has floated a front to highlight the problems of the disabled in Poonch and Rajouri districts, last got his disability pension in March 2016.

Says Fareed, “Whenever I meet a minister, he says Rs 3 crore has been given to Malkan panchayatfordevelopment.ifailtounderstand where this money has gone.”

The disease strikes early, when people are five to eight years old. It starts with pain and swelling in the joints, finally leaving those afflicted debilitated. The team of experts from Jammu University and Shri Mata Vaishnodevi University did DNA profiling of the villagers and identified it as “a very, very rare” skeletal disorder known as Progressive Pseudorheumatoidarthropathyofchildhood. It said the main reason for the ‘autosomal recessive genetic disease’ was “consanguineous marriages prevalent in the village”.

The villagers, however, do not have believe this theory. Mohammad Sharief, who is married to his cousin Hameeda, asks why only his eldest daughter, Naseem Akhtar, 28, is suffering from the disease among his five children.

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Last year, Goel and his wife, Dharna Garg, resigned from the position of Managing Director and CEO of Ringing Bells. “He made his brother, Anmol, the headofthecompanyandformedanother company. He told us during questioning that the Ringing Bells offices were shut down and hoardings were removed,” a police source said.

“He told us he was trying to find ways toearnalotofmoney.oneday,hisdomestic help asked him to give her a smartphone. He started looking at the reach of smartphones and compared them to newspapers. He said that although the cost of a newspaper is around Rs 82, it is sold to the public at Rs 2-5. He found that ‘at least a crore people’ did not own a mobile phone in India. He thought that even if he gives a smartphone to half of them, he could earn a lot of money. He came to knowthatthedifferenceinmobilephone prices in China and India was about 300 percent,andapproachedataiwan-based company,” the police officer said.

“After the launch, he got six lakh responses from people who wanted to buy the phone. In 48 hours, the number jumped to 25 lakh. In the last one year, around72,000ofthesephoneshavebeen sold but money was taken from lakhs of people. As soon as a complaint was about to be filed against them, they would pay the distributor the money they owed. But in the last few months, the company started running into losses. That is when he disassociated himself from the company,” said the police officer.

At the time of its launch, Goel had tried to get funding under the ‘Digital India’ initiative, but the government had clarified that it had nothing to do with the phone.