The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Ration cards: survey reveals irregularities

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 09, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Ration cards: survey reveals irregularities

By S. Harpal Singh

ADILABAD, DEC. 8. The new pilot survey to crosscheck and update the Multi Purpose Household Survey (MPHS) conducted by the `Velugu' project has revealed discrepancies relating to white ration cards distribution. It has also revealed that after weeding out `bogus' ration cards, the actual demand for subsidised rice for Adilabad would also decrease, thus saving Government money.

The State Government launched a fresh survey to determine the categories of people, especially with respect to economic status.

This would enable it to identify the eligible families for issuing white ration cards.

Glaring facts

The survey also came in the wake of reports of large-scale irregularities in the Poorest of the Poor (POP) survey done by the Velugu project last year.

The pilot survey was completed in Talamadugu mandal and Mandamarri Municipality in the district.It is still on in Gudihatnoor mandal which represents a tribal mandal. In Mandamarri Municipality, 13,740 families in all the 24 wards were surveyed.

As many as 1,679 new families were found eligible for the white ration card. 216 families were found to possess white card despite being ineligible. When the pilot survey findings were compared with key registers at the fair price shops in the municipality, as many as 2,604 were found to be bogus. (These have been categorised as bogus/ghost/door lock under the survey).

Rice demand may fall

When this data was analysed taking into consideration the weeding out of bogus cards and issue of white cards to new eligible families, it came out that the actual demand for rice in the municipality would go down by over 27 tonnes per month.

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