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.
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