A state that is hungry, it can be argued, is perpetually angry. Jharkhand, where a Muslim man was lynched on Wednesday on the suspicion that he was a thief and where a Dalit woman allegedly starved to death on Tuesday, seems to be both as it prepares to vote in a government again.

Scratch the shiny veneer of the “ease of business” surveys that place Jharkhand among the top-performing states, and less flattering surveys emerge.

The multidimensional poverty estimates made by the UNDP and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (2015-16) point out that 46.5 per cent of Jharkhand’s population is poor.

The National Family Health Survey IV (NFHS-IV) of 2015-16 says 48 per cent of Jharkhand’s population is in the lowest wealth quintile (the poorest one-fifth of the population). Its parent state, Bihar, has 53 per cent of its people in the category.

Savitri Devi of Chirudih, Giridih, died on Tuesday. Her marginal farmer husband Ramesh Turi said she had not eaten for two days and they did not have a ration card despite applying for one last year.

In Bokaro, Mubarak Ansari was killed by a mob after he and another man were caught “stealing” a vehicle battery from a bike service centre on Wednesday.

Asked to react on Savitri’s death, which the government has denied to be due to hunger, Right to Food activist Siraj Dutta pointed out that one-third or 33.33 per cent of Jharkhand’s adult women had less BMI (body mass index) than ideal.

That means they are too thin for their age. The national figure is 10 notches lower, at 23 per cent.

“It gets worse,” Dutta added. “Almost half of Jharkhand’s children are stunted, compared to 38 per cent in the country,” he said. Jharkhand, he said, had the highest proportion in India of children under 5 years whose malnutrition is visible in all three forms — stunting, wasting, and low weight. “As many as 10.9 per cent of the state’s children belong to this category.”