A 70-year-old mentally ill woman, who lived off leftovers from roadside eateries, was found dead on Sunday afternoon in industrial hub Adityapur, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought forgiveness from India’s poor for the lockdown.

The nationwide lockdown, which completed a week on Wednesday, has stung the poor the hardest — migrant workers, beggars and the mentally ill who live on the streets.

The destitute woman, whose name is not known, was found dead at Adityapur Industrial Area Phase 1, Seraikela-Kharsawan district, barely 7km from the heart of Jamshedpur, around 2pm on Sunday.

She was fed halwa by a security guard of a closed industrial unit the same morning around 8 after bystanders rescued her from a drain where she’d fallen.

She could not say when she had her last morsel before 8am on Sunday, or for that matter when she had fallen in the drain. All roadside eateries that normally gave her food are shut since last Wednesday, a day after Modi announced the lockdown.

Beside her body were an unopened packet of biscuits and an empty water bottle.

Security guard Manoj Sinha, who had offered the old woman halwa from his tiffin on Sunday morning, said she had fallen in a drain beside Sudisa Foundry Pvt Ltd, where Sinha works.

“It was a deep drain. I don’t know how long she had been there. She was last seen shuffling on Friday afternoon. We got her out and I gave her halwa that she ate, and I made her drink some water. But she could not move. Around 2pm, she was still motionless at the same spot,” Sinha said.

Another security guard had given her the packet of biscuits that were uneaten, he said.

Security guard Hari Purty, who showed the drain from where they rescued the deceased on Sunday, said she had become very weak.

“She could not speak properly, she lay there and died a few hours later. She had perhaps stayed without food in the drain for long,” Purty said, adding that she had been a familiar face in the locality since the past two years.

The OC of RIT police station Srinivas said they kept the body at the MGM Medical College mortuary for 72 hours. “No one turned up to claim her body,” he said on Wednesday night. “We disposed of it earlier in the evening after getting an autopsy done that will shed light on the cause of death.”

A social worker in the steel city, Praveen Akhauri, said that while the poor were by and large getting fed by corporate and social outfits as well as the administration, the mentally challenged stayed out of the loop. “They can’t understand public announcements or directions to community kitchens,” he said.