64-year-old Ramchandra Munda of Latehar district in Jharkhand passed away on June 5. A fact-finding team’s ground report has revealed that Munda became the victim of abject poverty, starvation and lapses in the systems like Public Distribution System, MGNREGA.

64-Yr-Old Dies Of Starvation

On June 8, 2019, a team from Right To Food (RTF) campaign, Jharkhand, including Mr. Balram, Mr. Ashrfi Nand Prasad, Ms. Piyalee Bose, Mr. Dheeraj, Father David Soloman, and Mr. Aakash Ranjan visited Lurgumi Kalan village of Durup Panchayat in Mahuadand subdivision of Latehar district, Jharkhand, for fact-finding of the alleged starvation death of an elderly, Late Ramcharan Munda (64 years).

Munda’s house

The team was accompanied by Ms. Afsana from the RTF campaign (she joined the team in Mahuadand and led the team to the victim’s home) who is apparently the first one to bring the entire incident into the limelight that caught the media attention and exposed the lapses in the PDS and district authority’s callousness in addressing this grave issue and the consequent event.

The fact-finding team’s investigation found that Munda’s death was a result of an amalgamation of multiple factors, arising out from systematic failure on various fronts.

Munda lived in a two-room mud hut with his wife. He is survived by his wife Chamri Devi, and two daughters- Subha Devi and Sunila Devi. The elder daughter lives in Mahuadand. The younger daughter is living in Dumri away from her parents. The elder daughter is suffering from TB. The couple had a son who died at the age of 17 due to TB around 15 years ago.

There are two toilets constructed, under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) – Grameen, in the immediate vicinity of the hut belonging to their relatives but the family doesn’t own one.

Munda’s entire village was not distributed ration from the last two months. The third month being June 2019. As a consequence of this serious system lapse, this particular family plunged into a crisis situation, suffering the most as two elderly people were living on their own, with nothing to earn, eat and no one to look after or take care of them. It may be noted that the family has a PH ration card (No.: 202004690268) under the Public Distribution System (PDS) but has not been getting ration since April 2019.

The reason behind the occurrence of this kind of blunder in the PDS is the allocation of the online distribution system for this particular village dealer, wherein the village has no internet connectivity. The current dealer, Meena Devi, was reallocated with the responsibility after her husband died three months ago, the husband being the previous dealer. In that process, the new system allocation went from offline to online, the only one in the entire block.

The family and the immediate neighbours and relatives complained that the dealer did not give away the ration but also agreed that Meena Devi made efforts on her part to go through the system to get the conversion done from online to an offline system, but the higher authorities did not take any further steps to address the issue.

No Source Of Income

Despite having a job card, which was made back in 2006 (MGNREGA Job Card No.: JH06/00445), Munda never got work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme. The trend is same throughout the village.

MNREGA Card

He used to engage in daily wage labour but due to age and much less to eat on a daily basis since past two months, he became quite weaker and started living at home, bedridden, from approximately past two weeks when he complained of uneasiness and bloated stomach. His wife, in order to take care of him, also could not venture out of home for any kind of work. Chamri Devi also stated that there have been days when Ramcharan Munda went out to work empty stomach and laboured that way.

The family has 50 decimal of land to itself that has been mortgaged 15 years ago to a local moneylender named Amardeep Nayak, in return for the money taken on loan by Ramcharan Munda for the treatment of his son. The land is still to be redeemed as full payment is yet to be done. It is at that time that the family also sold its bullock. So, the family has no land to work on, sell produce, or grow food for own consumption. So they were completely dependent on labour-based wage earning. He would work at the brick kiln work in Mahuaband, where he would earn Rs 150 per day.

Both Ramcharan Munda and his wife are eligible pensioners under the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) but have not received pensions since January 2019.

Dependent On Neighbours’ Mercy In the absence of any income source and monetary flow in the household and lack of ration, the starvation situation within the four walls was worsening day by day. As mentioned by Chamri Devi, and corroborated by the relatives and the neighbours, the couple was surviving on a handful of rice twice a day collecte…