Yes, and this is not a rhetorical claim. The Right to Food Campaign and independent reporters have documented dozens of starvation deaths tied directly to Aadhaar. The first was Santoshi Kumari, an eleven‑year‑old in Jharkhand, in September 2017, after her family’s ration card was cancelled for not being seeded with Aadhaar.
The pattern is recognisable across cases: a fingerprint that no longer reads on the Point of Sale machine, a name spelt slightly differently between the ration card and the Aadhaar database, a server outage at the dealer’s shop, a card de‑duplicated and cancelled without notice. Each of these is, in policy language, a “technical failure”. For the household at the receiving end, it is the loss of a month’s grain, and repeatedly, of a life.
We have collected names, dates and circumstances on our testimonials page. The underlying reports, including the Right to Food Campaign’s investigations, are catalogued in our resources. These deaths are not historical; the most recent cases are from this year.