West Bengal | Annapurna giveth, and taketh away

For Anita Khatun, the Rs 3,000 promise was a lifeline. Its absence, the starkest opposite. On August 22, the 32-year-old was found hanging at her home in Bachahar village in Malda’s Gazole. Her family talked of financial distress caused by irregular payments under West Bengal’s Annapurna Yojana. Her husband’s daily-wage earnings had never sufficed. Anita, they said, was a beneficiary under Lakshmir Bhandar, the flagship scheme of the Trinamool Congress regime. She applied for Annapurna after the change of government, received the allowance once, then allegedly went without payments for two months. She had approached the panchayat and block offices, in vain. The pursuit has ended at the morgue.