The semantics of starvation

For their lives, spent in a state of chronic hunger and deprivation, are a more telling indictment of India's porous social security net

On July 24, 2018, when three siblings, Mansi (8), Shikha (4) and Parul (2) died in a tenement in East Delhi, their autopsies revealed that they had neither food nor water in their bodies. Four days after their death, I accompanied the folks from the Delhi Right to Food Campaign and Center for Equity Studies on a fact-finding mission to Mandawali where the children lived and died. The experience left me feeling confused and convinced at the same time. Here’s what we found. 

When they died, the girls had been living in a room inside a two-storey building with 28 such