BHOPAL: A 74-year-old illiterate tribal woman who lives in the dense forests of Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh has been shown in government records to have died in 2016.
But it’s not only the landless septuagenarian, Dujiya Bai, who has been shown in records to have died on September 18, 2016. Her 39-year-old daughter Kubariya Bai and 44-year-old son-in-law Tiharu Yadav too have been declared dead in the state government records, despite being alive and working
as labourers in neighbouring Chhattisgarh.
The couple, according to Madhya Pradesh government records pertaining to Bajag gram panchayat, died within a span of 24 hours in October 2015. While Kubariya is shown to have died on October 10, 2015, husband Tiharu has been mentioned to have died a day later.
The shocking saga of the living trio being declared as dead in records came to the fore when the family recently went to a primary school in Dindori district for admission of Dujiya Bai’s great-granddaughter.
According to a local electrician Hira Lal Sahu at whose house the old woman’s other daughter works ,“the school in which her granddaughter was to be enrolled demanded the Samagra ID of the girl’s parents, after which we went to the Samagra ID registration centre, where it was also found that Dujiya Bai, her daughter and her son-in-law had been declared to have died in government records.”