Believe it or not. A woman in Badarpur area of south Delhi has a whopping 901 ration cards in her name and that too in the same address.
NEW DELHI: Believe it or not. A woman in Badarpur area of south Delhi has a whopping 901 ration cards in her name and that too in the same address.
The irony is that Manju, resident of Jasola village, herself does not know that she has got so many ration cards registered in her name.
In fact, she is not the only one to have several ration cards in one particular name.
There are many such cases which came to light recently after Food and Supplies Department of Delhi government undertook an exercise to match names and addresses of the entire list of ration cards holders here.
"They have found that 1,70,598 bogus cards existed of which 1,41,978 are Above Poverty Line (APL) cards and about 28,620 are Below Poverty Line (BPL) and Antodhya cards," RTI activist Arvind Kejrewal said here while releasing documents in this regard here.
Delhi has 15 lakh APL cards and about four lakh BPL cards. Of these 10 per cent cards have been found to be bogus.
"As a result of this in the last four years nearly a subsidy smounting to almost Rs 257 crore has been siphoned off," said Kejrewal.
In the last four years, subsidy amounting to Rs 176,84,77,968 on APL card holders, Rs 45,52,84,080 on BPL card holders and Rs 34,79,45,472 on those having AAY cards have been siphoned off too.
Commenting on the issue, Delhi's Food and Civil Supplies Minister Haroon Yusuf said action will be taken against those found guilty, even if they are within the department.
The Minister said the Delhi government had suspected this and had been working for the last four months to unearth details.
For almost four years, rations have been regularly drawn on these cards. Each card holder gets 25 kg of wheat and 10 kgs of rice. "Altogether, about two lakh tonnes of wheat and 82,000 tonnes of rice have been diverted in four years on these bogus cards," said another RTI activist.
The concentration of different bogus ration cards varies in different areas. In North west Delhi, 58,241 bogus cards were found in a population of 49,552, in west Delhi, a population of 35,847 people had 40,796 bogus ration cards followed by 21,257 bogus cards amongst 17,528 in south Delhi.
In north east Delhi, 14,728 bogus ration cards were detected in a population of 12,499, in south Delhi 14,470 bogus ration cards were found in a population of 14,470, in east Delhi 10,479 ration cards existed in a population of 8,668, while in New Delhi area in central Delhi and north Delhi area 2099, 4713 and 3815 bogus ration cards had been issued for a population of about than 1000.
Interestingly, these people in whose name the bogus cards existed, were not even aware about it.
Santosh, an RTI activist who resided in Sundernagri, had more than one card in her name. "I have just one card but when the list came out, I was shocked that there was another card too," she said.
"Investigations needs to be done immediately so that the benefits actually reach the poor. There should be a CBI inquiry into this," said Kejrewal.
There can be two possible causes for such a state of affairs, said Kejrewal.
"It is so that the food department officials are distributing the residential proofs of legitimate people to various shop owners at a price. The papers are then exploited by these shop owners to get multiple cards issued," he said
"Or there is one person who owns so many shops. The shop owners in these record are merely friends of this person. It is this person who conspired to get so many cards issued in the same name and address for all these shops," Kejrewal said.
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