Hunger kills sisters

TT, New Delhi: Three sisters, aged two to eight, died of complications caused by starvation on Monday night, a post-mortem report revealed on Wednesday. The eldest weighed just 15kg.

Mansi, Shikha and Parul were eight, four and two, respectively. They were already dead when neighbours brought them to Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital in Khichripur, east Delhi, in the early hours of Tuesday.

"We were informed by the hospital around 1.30pm yesterday (Tuesday) that three children had been brought dead," a police officer told The Telegraph. "Their post-mortem revealed there was no food in their intestines and that they had died of starvation around midnight."

The police have ordered a second post-mortem by a medical board, given that all the three deaths happened around the same time.

All the girls bore visible signs of starvation such as loose skin, sunken eyes and low fat. They had no external injury marks. "The cause of death is malnutrition/starvation and its complications," the post-mortem report said.

NDTV India reported that the girls' father, Mangal Singh, used to drive an e-rickshaw owned by his landlord in Mandawali, and that the family was evicted after the rickshaw got stolen recently.

The family was taken in by Singh's friend Narayan Yadav, who lives in Mandawali's Pandit Chowk, a low-income neighbourhood with several unauthorised tenements.

Singh left to find work on Tuesday morning and has not been seen since. The girls' mother Veena told NDTV India she couldn't feed them as they were vomiting and coughing. Neighbours took them to the hospital when they realised the children were unconscious.

Neither chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's office nor those of other ministers responded to queries. Lieutenant governor Anil Baijal's office said that no action had been ordered yet.

Anup Gupta, sub-divisional magistrate for Preet Vihar, under which Mandawali falls, said: "We are yet to receive any such information from the police." (Source & Courtesy: The Telegraph)