Lack of transport facility makes us inefficient: Food Minister
Srinagar: Declaring that no discrepancies will be tolerated in the issuance of BPL ration tickets, Minister for Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution, Chowdhary Zulfikar Ali Monday said that the ultimate motive of his Ministry is to stop pilferage and profiteering. He said process has been initiated for issuing new rations cards as per 2011 census and all arrangements have been made to ensure a consumer gets a months ration quota in advance.
The Minister said that there is no dearth of essential supplies. What makes CAPD inefficient is the lack of transport facility. We rely on SRTC vehicles and this corporation has become defunct. We have plenty of food grains in store and we fail to supply it in time due to lack of transport facility. The Chief Ministers vision is to ensure continuous supply of food grains and that too in advance, Zulfikar Ali told CNS adding that the cases of 200 employees of CAPD against whom corruption charges have been leveled are being examined thoroughly.
During previous government, CAPD department suffered heavily at the hands of some corrupt officials. We are not now in a position to incur more losses and thus there is no room for those people in the department who resort to corrupt and malpractices, he said adding that e-transfer mechanism was also being adopted to check corruption.
Enumerating measures to be taken by the department to check pilferage of ration, the CAPD Minister said the global positioning system was being put in place to track the movement of vehicles carrying ration.
Responding to a question, the Minister said that in past there were discrepancies in issuing BPL ration tickets to people and it was reported that in some cases they were issued to people not eligible to get them. To clear the discrepancies, the CAPD department has decided to implement SECC-2011 in issuing the BPL ration tickets.
We have decided to adopt SECC-2011 for issuing ration tickets to BPL families in JK. The department is now issuing ration tickets as per census 2011, in order to overcome shortfall of supply from the centre government, we have to issue new BPL ration tickets to people living below poverty line. For us there is no better standard than the SECC 2011 as it was conducted to know the economic condition of the people, he said.
He said that the government is providing ration through the public distribution system to 19.72 families with 1.01 crore people of the state as per the Census of 2001, but as per the Census of 2011, there are 22.73 families with 1.25 crore people.
The minister said the state was getting ration from the Centre for 18.02 lakh families with 99.45 lakh people as per the projected population of 2000 and there was a shortfall of 2 lakh metric tonnes.
In order to meet the shortfall, the minister said the matter had been taken up with the Central government and the issue was being pursued at various forums.
He said ration was at present being provided under four categories, BPL, Annapurna, Annatodya and APL.
Many people in the state do not take ration from depots. As the ration card is also being used for some legal requirements, we have decided to categorise the ration card as rationees and non-rationees, said Zulfikar. (CNS)
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