The district collector of Jhabua has denied that any of the 43 children, who perished in the district’s Meghnagar block between October and December 2009, died of malnutrition.
District Collector Jagdish Sharma attributed the deaths to anaemia and other diseases in his recent report to
the Madhya Pradesh state advisor to Supreme Court Commissioners in the Right to Food Case of 2001.
HT had on February 28 broken the story of the children’s deaths in predominantly tribal Jhabua district, 350 km from Bhopal. The report also mentioned that the advisor to Supreme Court Commissioner Sachin Jain had on February 4 written to the Jhabua district administration seeking action on the deaths.
Jain said the collector’s claims were contradictory and superfluous as there was enough evidence to show that the deaths were caused by malnutrition.