Stealing food from the mouths of the needy

Food intended for poor Indian families have been siphoned off and sold locally and abroad in a corruption scandal involving hundreds of local government officials, investigators said. Police and federal agents in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh are probing allegations that from 2001 to 2007, millions of tonnes of rice and wheat were diverted to other parts of the country and smuggled across the border to Nepal and Bangladesh. The food was meant to be sold at subsidised rates to households living below the poverty line. The investigation was on-going, but preliminary estimates suggested that around three million tonnes worth of hundreds of millions of dollars was stolen.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and police say the fraud appears to be “widespread” and “highly organised” involving a huge number of players. “The number of government officials involved in the case may run into the thousands … the majority are junior civil servants but there are senior ones too,” a CBI official said. “Apart from this, the involvement of a large number of transporters, traders, and shop owners is also feared,” he said.

The government’s largest welfare scheme -- the Public Distribution System (PDS) -- aims to target these people and provide poor consumers with basic food and non-food items at below market prices. Under the PDS, federal authorities buy food grains directly from farmers and then allocate it to state governments, which are responsible for selling it to poor families through a network of shops throughout the country. But investigators say in at least 18 of Uttar Pradesh’s 72 districts, the food grains did not reach the poor and were siphoned off and smuggled by rail and road to be sold in the open market. Food grains meant for food-for-work schemes and children's mid-day meal schemes were also stolen