In UP, rat-eating Musahars battle starvation, death -Radheshyam Jadhav

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published Published on Oct 8, 2018   modified Modified on Oct 8, 2018
-The Times of India

KUSHINAGAR, UP: The two sons of Sonwa Devi were very ill and hungry for days until they died, almost together, on September 14, unaware of the fact that the government, far away from their wretched lives in the eastern UP district, had celebrated September as National Nutrition Month to mark India’s fight against malnutrition.

A few kilometres away, in Rakba Dulma Patti village, Virendra Musahar and his family are devastated. His wife Sangeeta, who was just 30, and six-year-old son Shyam died on September 6. His daughter Geeta, two months old, passed away five days later. These deaths, allegedly from hunger, largely went unnoticed. Perhaps because they were Musahars, a Mahadalit community that has since ages depended on rats as their primary source of food. They still do. Rats and sometimes snails.

Meanwhile, government officials insist the deaths were not hunger-related.

It took the death of her children, one 16 and the other 22, for Sonwa Devi to receive some food from the administration. When TOI visited her house in the last week of September, a mass of people had gathered in front of the one-room shack with walls of bare brick in Musahar Basti, a squalid locality in Jungle Khirkia village, 23 km north of Kushinagar city. They were there to marvel at what for them was an unusual sight: a stack of food grain inside the unlit, damp room.

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The Times of India, 8 October, 2018, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/in-up-rat-eating-musahars-battle-starvation-death/articleshow/66112623.cms


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