The coincidence of the two items of “breaking news” is rather intriguing. In parallel to Mamata Banerjee inaugurating the helpline and website to facilitate direct connectivity with the people (www.didikebolo.com), the food and supplies minister, Jyotipriya Mullick, has exposed a fiddle with one of life’s essentials, The latest crisis underscores the failure of the Khadya Shathi scheme, so-called. As a totem of welfare, the name has turned out to be deceptive and painfully so with 47 ration shop dealers show caused for supplying a considerably reduced quantity of rice.
The fanfare with which the helpline number was announced and the website unveiled on Monday has been neutralised with the report on the same day that the poor are being shortchanged yet again. And the residents of Junglemahal, where many have been driven to absolute penury, are being shortchanged 12 years after the food riots in the same area of West Bengal (October 2007), not to forget the more deadly violence in 1966 when people were driven quicker to death than to a morsel of food.
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It redounds to the credit of the food minister that he has confessed that ration dealers are supplying less than the stipulated quantity of 5 kg of rice at Rs 2 a kg. That said, his department is not in a position to evade responsibility.
This reduction of supplies at the dealers’ end is a new spin on the operations of ration shops. In 2007, foodgrain earmarked for the Public Distribution System was being diverted on a round-trip to the open market, there to be sold at commercial rates. If the Bengal Left was impervious to this food racket in transit, the Trinamul dispensation appears to have tacitly condoned the calculated reduction of the PDS quota. To send vigilance teams to the affected districts of Purulia, West Midnapore, Jhargram and Bankura is good but it is also to be wise after the event.
The grim reality must be that the people of this permanently impoverished region have had less to eat at least for the past six months, a point of fact that makes a mockery of food security. In a way, it recalls the controversy once sparked by the Planning Commission over the quantum of food the people are entitled to eat under the Food Security Act, leave alone the nutrition factor. Whereas it was then a dispute within the government, it is the unscrupulous ration dealers who are at the root of the latest food fiddle. It is direly imperative for the government to get to the bottom of the scam and identify the ration dealers in the Junglemahal belt, irrespective of party loyalty. This is no less urgent than introducing WhatsApp numbers for registering separate complaints relating to rice, wheat and sugar ~ essential commodities all. What will they know of high-tech connectivity who only a struggle for survival know?
