Drive to weed out bogus ration cards proves to be a failure

GUNTUR: In a candid admission, district collector B Ramanjaneyulu on Thursday said that field-level survey carried out to weed out bogus ration cards proved to be a failure. While the field enumerators recommended cancellation of 1.99 lakh ration cards after a thorough door-to-door verification conducted for over three months last year, the government was finally forced to reinstate nearly 1.15 lakh cards after re-verification, said the collector.
After several complaints over cancellation of ration cards, re-verification was carried out to look into such complaints, said Ramanjaneyulu at a meeting here on Thursday.In addition to the reinstatement of 1.15 lakh cards, the government had cleared the request of the district administration for release of food grains to about 60,000 card holders.
Thus, the actual rations cards that were weeded out were just 25,000. It means, only 12.5 per cent of the total number of cards were declared as bogus ration cards in the district.
The statistics only reflected the level of seriousness of the surveys that were being carried out at the ground level, charged district TDP chief Prattipati Pullarao. "Neither the government nor the district administration is serious about these issues. There were several bogus ration cards with the dealers but they remained untouched. The officials only tried to weed out some genuine cards. After an uproar from the public, they reinstated some of the genuine cards but still did not eliminate the real fake cards," he said.
Meanwhile, the district collector suspected that there could be a few more bogus ration cards with the dealers themselves. Warning that the district administration would not tolerate such dealers, the collector asked them to surrender all such ration cards within the next 15 days on their own. He said that the district administration had booked nearly 12 cases in the last two months and seized stocks worth nearly Rs.19 crore from the ration shop dealers who were involved in the illegal transportation of the subsidized stocks.