Right to Food Campaign Odisha has highlighted that Risa Mankadia an elderly man from a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group(PVTG) community has died of #hunger after he failed to complete the Aadhaar linking and updating #ekyc for his Antodaya ration card.

Being single person on his card, he tried to complete it multiple times, RTF reports, but failed. He was being denied his entitled ration since June and Mankadia died on October 22.

https://x.com/rozi_roti/status/1983744249624719760

There is a recent history of a large number of Aadhaar related denials causing a large number of starvation deaths, particularly in interior villages in this and Jharkhand region, as documented here in 2020 by Siraj Dutta, an activist living in Jharkhand, where 27 people died in the five years after Aadhaar was made mandatory. It worsened chronic hunger and under-nutrition when the poorest communities could not access digital technologies that had been made compulsory to access their welfare rights.

Rethink Aadhaar demands investigation into Mankadia’s death and accountability from central and Odisha officials and companies running Aadhaar systems for the denial of vital social security in Mankadia’s final months.