The reality called India!

As the dust settles down on the Gujarat elections and the PM modi and the opposition leader Rahul start thinking about the next elections, in the tiny hamlet in Jharkand, this family is still coming to terms with the loss of their dearest child.

Koili Devi has four children. The older two just entered their teens had been married off. The youngest was twleve. The husband was earning some Rs. 100 a day for five days a month till he descended rapidly in to mental illness some five years ago. But now he only sleeps or wanders about, and the burden fell on Koili Devi's thin shoulders to feed and tend to him apart from his children and his aged mother. 

Critically dependent on the subsidised rations they receive through the public distribution system to keep hunger at bay, catastrophe struck the family when the state administration made it mandatory for all ration cards to be linked to biometric identification through Aadhar. 

The subsidised grains were the thin thread that held the family aloft above hunger. And when that thread snapped, starvation became an inevitability. 

Even though the youngest kid, Santoshi, had dropped out of school she would still take a break from her cow grazing to eat the mid day meal served in school. But the school had closed for the festival season. Santoshi's health began to slide, and she whimpered all the time, begging for rice. But all they had in the hovel were tea leaves and salt. The child finally died crying for rice; 

This story somehow penetrated the customary indifference of the national press and nudged its way to the front pages of the national dailies, and it even briefly pricked our conscience.

Even as the family was mourning, the officials in that area were quick in their defence. Santhoshi died of malaria. The family is not saying the truth said they. The ruling BJP remonstrated that Koili Devi should abandon her claim that her child had died of salvation and accept that she succumbed to Malaria. They even promised rewards for agreeing to accept that. There were even threats. The chief minister said Koili Devi had brought bad name to the village by her claim of death by starvation. 

For those of you who think this is an one off incident, Koili Devi's was only one of the eleven lakh ration cards cancelled in the state for failing to link with aadhar. For those of you who think this is a story straight from Bollywood, believe me I  myself have walked in to many remote villages in the northern India, where poverty is a reality. 

This my dear friends is the reality called India.