The lane to her house is an upward slope, one which Aadhilakshmi, 72, finds hard to climb after a leg surgery last year. The home in a slum colony in Bhavani Nagar, in the Suddagunte Palya area of south Bengaluru, is a single room that she shares with six other family members.
Aadhilakshmi and her husband Kunnaiah Ram, 83, migrated to Bengaluru around 30 years ago from a village in Madurai district, Tamil Nadu, in search of work. While he found a job as a carpenter, she raised their two sons and two daughters.
“Just because I am old does that mean I do not need to eat?” she asks. It’s a question she has repeated an unfortunate number of times in the last six months when she and her husband were denied their rations – seven kilos of free rice per person per month. The subsidised salt, sugar, palm oil and soap they got in addition to the rice, for which they had to pay Rs. 150, has also stopped.
Why was the elderly couple denied their rations? For both, fingerprint authentication failed at the PDS outlet
— source ruralindiaonline.org | Vishaka George | May 1, 2022
