Malda, Aug. 13: The three members of a family found dead in Dhima village in Baishnabnagar were facing acute poverty, police said today.

The decomposed bodies of day labourer Gopal Das, his wife Shikha and four-year-old son Kunal were recovered from their hut in the village yesterday after neighbours were alerted by a stench.

Malda police chief Satyajit Bandyopadhyay said preliminary investigations suggest that Gopal had poisoned his wife and son before hanging himself. “We have registered two cases, one for murder and the other for suicide,” he said.

“We believe that tension in the family fuelled by poverty was the cause of the deaths,” the police chief added.

The Congress sabhapati of the Baishnabnagar panchayat samiti, Dilip Mondol, who came to power this year, said: “The family somehow managed one meal a day. Moreover, the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has not been done properly in the entire block.” Baishnabnagar gram panchayat is located in Kaliachak III block.

Mondal added that only one fourth of the Rs 8 lakh that was supposed to be spent in the block under NREGS had been utilised last year. “We faced many problems, especially in deciding the projects for which we would give work,” said block development officer Bhaskar Moktan.

The situation is the same across Malda district.

The former sabhadhipati of the zilla parishad, Gautam Chakrabarty, claimed that crores of rupees were lying unutilised in the district where 536 villages had been identified as poverty-stricken in 2006. “Thousands of men and women are leaving the district to look for jobs elsewhere because of the simple reason that we cannot provide them work here,” the Congress leader said.

Chakrabarty, who did not get a ticket to contest the panchayat polls this time, said only 16 per cent of the money sent by the Centre and the state for NREGS had been utilised in Malda in 2006-2007. “The district administration has failed to monitor the implementation of NREGS and other poverty-alleviating projects,” he said.

District magistrate Chittaranjan Das said the implementation of the schemes had been badly affected since February this year. “First there was the Kharba Assembly by-election and then we had the panchayat polls. We could not do anything because of the model code of conduct,” the DM said.

“The incident in Dhima is tragic. I have heard that in November 2005, six members of a family had similarly ended their lives in the same village,” Das added.