In the late autumn of 2009, reports of a dire food crisis among the Adivasis of western Madhya Pradesh started to appear in Indian national newspapers. In just two villages in Jhabua district, Agasia and Madora, 25 children were reported to have died in the course of only two weeks. These children died as a result of malnutrition, which had caused a dramatic fall in their immunity levels, rendering them vulnerable to dengue and anaemia (Singh 2009a). By February 2010, the situation had deteriorated even further: 46 Adivasi children were reported to have died of malnutrition in three villages in Jhabua (Singh 2010a; Jain 2011; Dutta 2010).

The malnutrition deaths in Jhabua in the autumn of 2009 were a stark manifestation of the dramatic loss of food security in Madhya Pradesh, where child mortality rates rank among the highest in the world, and levels of malnutrition among children surpass the levels found in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Singh 2009b; Chauhan 2009). Malnutrition takes a particularly harsh toll on the state's Adivasi population, with 71.4 per cent of tribal children in the state being malnourished and 82.5 per cent suffering from anaemia. Whereas the average infant mortality rate (IMR) in the state stands at 70/1,000, the IMR for Scheduled Tribe areas stands at 95.6/1,000 (Singh 2010a, 2010b). In Jhabua and Badwani, the under-five mortality stands at 96 and 92 per 1,000 respectively, compared to 74 in a comparatively affluent district like Indore (HUNGaMA 2011: 71). According to the India Human Development Report for 2011, infant mortality rates and under-five mortality rates are particularly high among Scheduled Tribes in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh (Planning Commission 2011). Five years later, very little had changed, with 50 per cent of children in Alirajpur, Dhar, Jhabua, and Dindori—all districts where more than half the population are Adivasis—reported to be suffering from malnutrition (Pandey 2016).

Responding to the malnutrition deaths in Jhabua, human rights activists in the region pointed to the failure of public service delivery to the poorest of the poor as a key problem.