SC to hear starvation death plea in 2 weeks

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 26

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear after two weeks a petition highlighting starvation deaths in Jharkhand due to cancellation of ration cards for want of Aadhaar.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra asked senior advocate Colin Gonsalves to give a copy of the petition to the Centre's counsel and said the matter would be taken up after two weeks.

The Bench chose not to issue a formal notice to the government.

The mother and sister of an 11-year-old girl, Santoshi, who have approved the top court along with a social activist, contended that poor Dalit families in Jharkhand had been denied foodgrains under the public distribution scheme due to non-linkage of Aadhaar and ration cards. Similar deaths have occurred in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, Gonsalves added.

The petitioners said they had both ration card and Aadhaar but linkage was not done by officials. After their ration card was cancelled the family had promptly applied for a new one that was linked with Aadhaar but did not receive it. The family had stopped getting rations from March 2017 and the girl died of starvation in September.

Gonsalves demanded that the families should be compensated for the loss as denial of food grains under the PDS is a violation of the top court's 2002 judgment.

He, however, clarified his clients were not challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar which was already being heard by a five-judge Constitution Bench.

The petitioners demanded criminal prosecution and departmental proceedings against the officials for the lapses and gross negligence in failing to prevent the starvation deaths.

‘IN US, Aadhaar will be happily accepted’

• Slamming the “noise” in the media on privacy issues, UIDAI chief Ajay Bhushan Pandey on Monday said people voicing concern over data security would “happily accept” an Aadhaar-like scheme in the United States
• Addressing a seminar, he said people in the US needed a social security number to get a driver's licence, to open a bank account, for marriage, divorce or even for a death certificate. There people concerned would have no problem with that