New Delhi: Poor implementation of welfare schemes by the Delhi government allowed for conditions in which three sisters - Mansi, 8, Shikha, 4, and Parul, 2 - died of starvation in the national capital last month, a fact-finding report by a group of six activists has found.
The team that included Harsh Mander, a former bureaucrat and special commissioner to the Supreme Court for Right to Food cases, found that the girls' family - like most families in the neighbourhood - did not have ration cards and that the absence of safeguards such as social audits and a State Food Commission had led to non-functional anganwadis.
The three daughters of rickshaw puller Mangal Singh died on the night July 23 in a single-room tenement in a slum in Mandawali, which is part of deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia's Patparganj constituency.
A post-mortem found that all three died of "malnutrition/starvation and its complications". A second post-mortem was ordered, and the viscera samples have been sent to a forensic lab to check for poison.
The eldest child had a bank account, with a deposit of Rs 1,805, a magisterial probe has found. The account was opened by the school she attended, which deposited the money under direct benefit transfer for books and uniform.
The children were suffering from loose motion and vomiting in the days before they died, it said. The girls' mother is mentally ill.
The magisterial probe report said the father has been missing since July 23 after he gave the girls "an unknown medicine".
After the deaths, Sisodia had demanded a report from the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) that run anganwadi crèches, which provide early childhood care, education and nutrition to children before they start school. Sisodia also asked the planning department to collect education and health details of each of Delhi's 1.1 crore residents.
The fact-finding report says: "There was no functional anganwadi at the place where the family lived for several years (Railway Colony). As a result, the two younger siblings were not enrolled in any anganwadi and were not receiving the daily food rations that they were entitled to under the Integrated Child Development Scheme....
"The anganwadi centres are mandated to monitor the growth of children by weighing them regularly. Anganwadi workers are required to survey the local area to identify children and ensure their enrolment in the anganwadi. While it would be easy to lay the blame on the frontline worker, the failure extends much beyond. Anganwadi workers are paid a pittance, not even minimum wages (workers and helpers are paid Rs 9,678 and Rs 4,839 a month, respectively) and are expected to be at the front line for all kinds of schemes and programmes, including those that have little to do with the well-being of children."
The fact-finding report also said that not only did the family not have a ration card, "of the 28 families who live in the building where the girls eventually died only one or two had a ration card. Similarly, none of the neighbours in the Railway Colony (where the family had lived till days earlier) had ration cards and only one rickshaw puller - from among the 25 we met - possessed a ration card."
The reasons for this, said the report, include: "A quota system is followed under the PDS where number of people to be given ration cards is pre-decided and therefore, even if people meet the eligibility criteria, they are excluded. Further, many people get excluded due to insistence on furnishing of ID proof/address proof and Aadhaar. These end up excluding the most needy and marginalised...."
The fact finding team also included Delhi Rozi Roti Adhikar Abhiyan's Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri, Anirban Bhattacharya and Vidit Verma from the Centre for Equity Studies), and Satark Nagrik Sangathan's Ashok Kumar.
The report added: "The National Food Security Act requires each state government to implement various grievance redress and accountability provisions, including carrying out of periodic social audits (Section 28) and setting up of a State Food Commission (Section 16). The Delhi government has failed to put in place this statutory framework despite repeated directions from the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court. Lack of accountability systems means people's complaints of denial of food security, like not having a ration card, non-functional anganwadis etc. remain unaddressed."
Mansi had been regular at school before the summer vacations, neighbours said, but had attended only a couple of days of school in July. "Perhaps the lack of provision of midday meal during the vacations may have contributed towards her untimely death. Even in the case of the 11-year-old girl Santoshi who died of starvation in Simdega district of Jharkhand, local fact-finding teams found that the disruption in the midday meal due to Durga Puja vacations, was a contributing factor," the report said.
