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India's Immense 'Food Theft' Scandal
By Geeta Pandey, BBC News, Lucknow, BBC NEWS, SOUTH ASIA
February 21, 2011: The poorest of the poor in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, are at the heart of a major food scandal. The Indian media has described it as "the mother of all scams". The scale is immense. It involves thousands of officials from top-level bureaucrats to middle-level officers to ground-level workers. It also involves thousands of transporters, village council leaders and fair-price shop owners.
It stretches across 54 of the state's 71 districts, and investigators say the food is carried out of the state and sometimes even beyond Indian borders to Bangladesh and Nepal.
India's top investigating agency - the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) - once tried to withdraw from the case saying it did not have the manpower to deal with it. It said it would require the registration of 50,000 police cases. One official said that if all the guilty are convicted, a new jail might have to be built to accommodate them.
Newly appointed state Food Commissioner Rajan Shukla told the BBC the government is committed to resolving the issue.
"The subsidized supplies were siphoned off and sold in the open markets at much higher rates. In government records, they were shown to have been distributed among the people," says Vishwanath Chaturvedi, who filed a petition in court in 2005 demanding that those involved be punished. Mr Chaturvedi's complaint was based on the report of the government's food cell, a police unit set up to examine corruption in food supplies, which covered a period of 19 months from April 2004 to October 2005. The food cell conducted raids across several districts. "We found massive discrepancies," a senior official involved with the raids said. "The scam was so brazenly carried out that when we checked vehicles which were used to carry grains, we found that the registration numbers were of motorcycles, scooters and even bicycles."
The stolen supplies estimated to be worth $7.45bn (£4.8bn) in the year 2004-2005. In December 2007, officials told court they had evidence to show that supplies were stolen from 2002 to 2007. Mr Chaturvedi says the practice continues and if you calculate for the last 10 years, it adds up to more than $42.6bn (£27.5bn).
A senior official in the food cell says even today 40% to 70% of supplies from the public distribution system are stolen.
In a recent order, the judges described the corruption in Uttar Pradesh as "alarming" and said the "administration has failed to disburse food to the poor and down-trodden". The court ordered the investigating agencies to go after the guilty regardless of their position and the power they wielded.
