Empty Gravy Train

ZUBEIDA8217;S vessels still lie empty. A small hut occupied four months ago by Kammissan, too lies vacant. She is dead. Kammissan died of h...

ZUBEIDA8217;S vessels still lie empty. A small hut occupied four months ago by Kammissan, too lies vacant. She is dead. Kammissan died of hunger.

Five months after The Express reported the death of three people in this village due to hunger8212;including Kammissan8217;s only son Rabbani 22 and Zubeida8217;s husband Khuresha 458212;nothing has changed for the weavers of this once prosperous village. Zubeida has given away her six month old baby to a relative.

8216;8216;The Block Development Officer BDO told me he has not taken the contract to feed the starving,8217;8217; she says. There are at least three government schemes to give subsidised food grains to the needy. The BDO is the implementing officer for these. Under the Targeted Public Distribution System TPDS, there is a Below Poverty Line BPL card scheme, the Antyodaya Anna Yojana AAY and the Annapurna scheme, all intended to reach the most vulnerable in terms of food security.

An Express investigation reveals that across Bihar, these schemes rarely reach the targets. Dilgauri village8217;s handloom sector has collapsed over the last decade and people forced to switch professions. Some became labourers, others moved to big cities. Since their earnings are erratic, they are malnourished and vulnerable to tuberculosis and finally death. In all such cases, government officials hide behind technicalities. Soon after the deaths of Khuresha and Rabbani, Bhagalpur District Magistrate K.P. Ramaiya said: 8216;8216;These are due to malnutrition and diseases.8217;8217;

Dilaguri is not an isolated case in Bihar, which has 27 of India8217;s worst 69 districts in terms of poverty, hunger, literacy, immunisation, infant mortality and elementary enrolment. Bihar has 37 districts, of India8217;s total 466.

In October, in Madhepura, the constituency of Union Minister for Food and Civil Supplies Sharad Yadav, three from a family of Musahars, the most deprived among the Dalits, died. District magistrate S.M. Shamsuddin then said: 8216;8216;They did not die of hunger, but of disease.8217;8217; But he admitted that the 8216;8216;family had no income at all.8217;8217;

In Surtipatti Diha Tola in Beria, Supaul district, a handicapped widow Shahnaz and her six daughters survived by begging. But with the flood in June 2003, and the following famine, the charity too stopped. Two of her daughters died in August 2003. Subsidised food grain under the Antyodaya scheme that she was eligible for, stopped five months ago. Shahnaz says officials threatened her to give a statement that her daughters died of a disease. And the deaths didn8217;t stop.

The hunger tally

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Shravan Pandey, wife Chintamani Devi, daughter Puja Kumari in Ibrahimpur, Nalanda were not covered under the TPDS. Their survivors got a house under the Indira Awas Yojana. Minister Vijay Shanker Dubey gave Rs 10,000. Mukhya Shailendra Prasad says they died of disease and cold.

Rajendra Rai, rickshaw puller in Chehara Kala, Vaishali, too was not covered under the schemes. Government says he died due to an illness.

Nuresh Kumari, Jhapsi Majhi, Sagia Kumari, Azad Majhi, Vasanti Kumari, Ravindra Majhi, Bughiya Kumari, Lalbabu Majhi in Dariapur Musahari Tola, Patna. Official reports say deaths 8216;8216;due to severe cold.8217;8217;

Satya Narayan Saha, labourer in Jalalpur in Buxur. Government explanation: 8216;8216;death due to disease.8217;8217;

None of these people who died of hunger were covered by any of the schemes. Investigators call embezzlement the culprit in this emerging tragedy. The inherently flawed nature of the distribution scheme had even led a union government appointed expert committee to certify it unviable.

India8217;s universal PDS was converted to TPDS in 1997. The idea was to deliver the decreasing subsidies to the 8216;8216;very poor,8217;8217; separating them even from the 8216;8216;moderately poor.8217;8217; Besides India8212;home to 320 million hungry people of the 840 million world over8212;other developing countries too have introduced TPDS.

In 2000, the project was further focussed by introducing two more schemes. Under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana AAY, 10 million were to get 25 kg grain monthly, rice at Rs 3 and wheat at Rs 2. Under the Annapurna scheme 8216;8216;indigent senior citizens,8217;8217; were to get 10 kg grain free.

In Bihar, 6.1 million families were selected for the BPL cards. For the AAY, in 2000, 1 million families8212;which will now be increased to 1.5 million8212; were selected, and for the Annapurna scheme, 0.16 million families. Increase in the price of the BPL grain between 1997 and 2001 has resulted in the collapse of the scheme. 8216;8216;Now government sells grain to exporters and BPL cards at the same rate,8217;8217; says Devinder Sharma, food and trade policy analyst.

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Dilaguri is not an isolated case in Bihar, which has 27 of India8217;s worst 69 districts in terms of poverty, hunger

In Dilgauri, about 140 of the 800 families have BPL cards but it8217;s of little use. 8216;8216;We never get rice because it is always siphoned off by the distributors,8217;8217; says Ayub Khan, member of the Sultanganj municipal council.

8216;8216;The price of BPL grain borders the market price,8217;8217; says Shishir Sinha, Civil Supplies secretary of the Bihar government. 8216;8216;In my district, during harvest season rice is available in the market at rates much lower than BPL8217;s,8217;8217; says H. S. Meena, former district magistrate Nalanada.

In Bhagalpur, in the first five months of 2003-04, only 21 per cent of the BPL grain was lifted from warehouses. But in the AAY and Annapurna, where the rates are much lower than the market, utilisation is almost 100 per cent in Bihar against last year8217;s national average of 72.26 per cent. But this doesn8217;t mean that all that is lifted from warehouses reaches the target. There is almost a 100 per cent leakage.

In 2000, 2.1 million of the 6.1 million cards in circulation in the state were found to be either fake or used by people not eligible for them.

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This cost the exchequer Rs 30 million, estimates a report by Manoje Nath, then IG-CID, Economic Offences Wing, Bihar Police.

Under utilisation on the one hand and plain loot on the other, have caused the poor in Bihar over Rs 100 million since 1997, says a CID report. While the debate over the targeted public distribution system goes on, the poor in Bihar go hungry for another day.