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Journalism of Courage
The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave state chief secretaries a fortnights time to take positive action to indicate the amount of additional foodgrains required under the public distribution scheme for distribution among the poor.
No one should die of starvation and malnutrition in poor districts. We direct Chief Secretaries of all states to indicate within two weeks how much additional foodgrains are required, a bench led by Justice Dalveer Bhandari said.
The observations were a follow-up on the apex courts earlier suggestion that the Centre allocate an additional five million tonnes of foodgrains to 150 of the poorest districts of the country under the supervision of a specially-appointed committee.
The court further asked the Centre to take steps for the computerisation of entire PDS (Public Distribution System) to stop pilferage and corruption.
There is a huge pilferage and corruption in PDS and it could be reduced by computerisation. This has to be done at a great speed. You have to computerise the whole system in order to bring total transparency, the bench said.
The bench was hearing a PIL filed by Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) complaining about large-scale corruption and irregularities in the PDS mechanism.
The apex court had earlier asked the centre to allocate an additional five million tonnes of foodgrains to the 150 poorest districts of the country under the supervision of a committee appointed by it.
