UK study nails Naidu's govt on FFW scam

HYDERABAD: As Gujarat burned earlier this year, the TDP regime ruling the state threw dark hints at pulling out support to the NDA government at the Centre and wrested from it a huge tranche of rice for its welfare programme, says a study sponsored by the Department for International Development (DFID) of the UK.
The Centre agreed to release the rice to the state''s Food for Work (FFW) scheme ignoring the allegations of graft besetting that programme."No other NDA partner has recieved the largesse that the Vajpayee government bestowed on the TDP. There is plenty of evidence of favoured status to AP," says the draft study.
DFID is a major donor to the state. The report also details how some TDP leaders and government officials connived to get FFW rice "recycled". After sustained demands for accounts by the opposition and the media, the government conceded that approximately 20 per cent of the FFW rice had been siphoned off.
In money terms, this translates into Rs 6 billion. But, the report claims, the level of corruption was far greater. The state received more than 3 million tonnes of rice between Sept 2001 and July 2002, enough to feed 20 million workers for nearly a year. This would have a market value of Rs 20 billion.
But not much of this rice went to the people it was meant for.
"Misappropriation and corruption began at the lower tiers of officialdom and spread upwards with ever-increasing margins. The impunity with which politcians, line department officials, contractors (although there were not meant to be any) and panchayat staff stole from the poor without fear of punishment, was testimony to the social and political sanction that such acts by the powerful have in the existing system," the report says.
According to the study, "the government of Andhra Pradesh lifted the rice and then ''allowed'' it to be sold to generate the much-needed cash for the cash component (of the FFW scheme), as well as cash for political purposes." In a section titled ''Growing malpractice, growing political immunity and growing impunity,'' the study reveals that in some villages where the survey was conducted, "47 per cent to 99 per cent of the rice was misappropriated".
Disregarding the government claims on the action taken against irregularities, the study says "apart from a few high-profile bookings and arrests, little was done to change the monitoring and evaluation of FFW."