Hunger deaths in Laloo loyal country

Like the condition of weavers, says Ansari, once trained by the government and later left to fend for themselves after the Bhagalpur riots of 1989. Says Ansari: ‘‘Under the 20-point programme, 40 people including me were trained as weavers and given loans to buy handlooms. We used to get silk yarn from exporters on credit. But after the 1989 riots, the credit flow stopped, and we became defaulters.’’

The exporters shifted loyalties to powerlooms, which were faster and cheaper as the market required. Even Khadi Gram Udyog Bhawan that earlier supplied yarn on credit stopped eventually. While in many villages weavers switched to powerlooms, Dilgauri didn’t have that choice as it doesn’t have electricity and can’t afford generators.

As the looms of the village fell silent, people were forced to switch professions. Some took on manual labour, others moved to the big cities.

‘‘Mohammad Kasim (among the dead) worked as a construction labour,’’ Ansari says. We are at his mud house, where Kasim’s wife Zubeida spends her days wondering how she and her seven children will survive. The youngest, Abida, is only four months’ old.

Recalling the day her husband died, Zubeida says: ‘‘He lifted something heavy and just collapsed.’’ Kasim had become frail and undernourished towards his death, and that gives officials the loophole they need. ‘‘These are malnutrition deaths and deaths due to diseases,’’ says District Collector K.P. Ramaiya.

However, even if it was TB that killed Kasim and the others, they couldn’t have fought it in Laloo’s Bihar. The ‘‘referral hospital’’ of Sultanganj is just bordering the village that has at least 25 TB patients, but for all the National TB Eradication schemes, it has no medicines for the disease.

‘‘We don’t receive them and so we can’t distribute them,’’ head of the hospital Dr Girijandan Sharma says matter-of-factly. One of the villagers, Ziban Khan (30), was diagnosed with TB four years ago, but has not got any medicine till now.

Within the hospital compound is the skeleton of a building that was planned as a school but abandoned halfway. Funds were allotted under Operation Black Board to construct the new building, but presumably disappeared. The lone teacher has not heard about the mid-day meal scheme either. With their parents struggling to make two ends meet, children of these weavers sit outside the dilapidated building whiling away time.

The families of the deceased have got 25 kg of rice as relief from the government so far, but that won’t last long. ‘‘We hold a red card (for subsidised grain for people below poverty line),’’ admits Zubeida, ‘‘but never had the money to even buy that.’’

The story of around 140 of the 800 families in this village holding the red cards is the same. ‘‘We never get rice because it is always siphoned off by the distributors. Wheat is available, but the market rate and the red card rates are almost the same,’’ says Ayub Khan, Ward Commissioner.

Apart from the BPL scheme intended to distribute grain at reduced prices, there are two more schemes for the poorest of the poor. But the three who have died apparently had no access to either the Antyodaya or the Annapurna scheme, under which free grain is distributed.

But in the graveyard of failed government schemes, hope hasn’t still died. ‘‘If somebody invests or makes capital and technology available, we can still stand on our feet,’’ says Ansari earnestly.