KUSHINAGAR, UP: The two sons of Sonwa Devi were very ill and hungry for days until they died, almost together, on September 14, unaware of the fact that the government, far away from their wretched lives in the eastern UP district, had celebrated September as National Nutrition Month to mark India’s fight against malnutrition.A few kilometres away, in Rakba Dulma Patti village, Virendra Musahar and his family are devastated. His wife Sangeeta, who was just 30, and six-year-old son Shyam died on September 6. His daughter Geeta, two months old, passed away five days later. These deaths, allegedly from hunger, largely went unnoticed. Perhaps because they were Musahars , a Mahadalit community that has since ages depended on rats as their primary source of food. They still do. Rats and sometimes snails.Meanwhile, government officials insist the deaths were not hunger-related.It took the death of her children, one 16 and the other 22, for Sonwa Devi to receive some food from the administration. When TOI visited her house in the last week of September, a mass of people had gathered in front of the one-room shack with walls of bare brick in Musahar Basti, a squalid locality in Jungle Khirkia village, 23 km north of Kushinagar city. They were there to marvel at what for them was an unusual sight: a stack of food grain inside the unlit, damp room.One of them giggled that Sonwa Devi was a lucky woman. Starvation has haunted the community for as long as it can remember. A few kilometres away, in Rakba Dulma Patti village, Virendra Musahar and his family are devastated. His wife Sangeeta, who was just 30, and six-year-old son Shyam died on September 6. His daughter Geeta, two months old, passed away five days later. “We survive on anything that is eatable,” said Virendra, still in trauma.He had sold off his handcart a few months ago to feed his family. The daily wage labourer has hardly got any work since. Sangeeta, too, had registered with MGNREGA in 2017, but her card is empty because she did not get any work.Just like with Sonwa, officials left stacks of food grain with Virendra after his wife died. But they won’t last forever. “My 10-year-old son Laxman died some years ago in a similar manner. These packets of food and some money will delay our deaths for some time,” he said.The government record states that Sangeeta and her kids died of diarrhea. Officials insisted that the deaths have nothing to do with hunger.According to Kushinagar’s chief medical officer Haricharan Singh, the Sonwa Devi’s boys died of cardiorespiratory failure and had pulmonary tuberculosis, while one of them also had poliomyelitis. “The two brothers didn’t die of hunger but from TB. A probe is underway to see if they got treatment for the disease. Our government has given jobs, ration cards and houses to Musahars. The family had a ration card too,” said UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath shortly after the deaths. But TB officer Rakesh Kumar from Padrauna block said that tests done by him revealed no such thing.“Senior officials have been warning me not to reveal the truth,” he added.Sonwa Devi also rubbished the claim. "Government doctors kept telling us there was nothing wrong with my boys. Staff asked for money to get them admitted. They died within hours of being admitted, without food or medicine,” she said. “We get to eat only if we work. As my sons were sick, survival became difficult. I have not got any work under MNREGA. We do not have a ration card, but a number which we have to quote at the PDS shop, which gives us what and how much it wants." Looking around, she then wondered: “The officials have dumped food grain in my house and have promised a toilet. There is no place to sit here. Where will they build a toilet?”Next door in Semara Hardo village, tiny Arjun and the other Musahar children don't go to school. The whole day they spend looking for rats. As soon as they catch a couple, they roast and eat the rodents. On days that they catch more, they bring the food home. That's dinner. And breakfast the next morning too.“Rats and snails are what help us survive,” said Arjun's mother Usha. “Most of us live on daily wages. We get only rice or wheat from PDS shops. We have no idea how much they give us, but it's too little. When we need money for anything else, including medicines, we sell the grains to city people. We can have either medicines or food. When we fall sick, we just die.”