Poor starve as politicians steal Rs 80,649 crore worth of food

• Posted by Sindhuri G August 30, 2012 - Filed in Business - 2,125 views

  NEW DELHI: Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidised rations that now serves as a symbol of India's biggest food heist.

  Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes' drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice.
  
  By law, those 57,000 tonne of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They are meant for some of the 350 million families living below India's poverty line of 50 cents a day.
  
  Instead, as much as $14.5 billion (around Rs 80,649 crore) in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen's home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country's only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India's hungriest.
  
  In Gonda, the one district for which all three investigative authorities have agreed upon a number, the market value of food diverted was $82 million over a four-year period. Extrapolating over 10 years for the state's 71 districts at the time, as much $14.5 billion may have been stolen. Uttar Pradesh now has 75 districts.
  
  

  

  
  
  "This is the most mean-spirited, ruthlessly executed corruption because it hits the poorest and most vulnerable in society," said Naresh Saxena, who, as a commissioner to the nation's Supreme Court, monitors hunger-based programs across the country. "What I find even more shocking is the lack of willingness in trying to stop it."
  
  A state police force beholden to corrupt lawmakers, an underfunded federal anti-graft agency and a sluggish court system have resulted in five overlapping investigations over seven years - and zero convictions.