What's new

India's Poor Starve as Politicians Steal Their Food

Patriot

ELITE MEMBER
Joined
Sep 8, 2008
Messages
7,713
Reaction score
0
A 20-minute drive from the Indian village of Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and groups of malnourished children, there’s a government storage facility overflowing with wheat and rice. The complex is five football fields long and holds 57,000 tons of food meant for some of the nation’s 350 million families living below the poverty line of 50¢ a day. None of it is reaching the 106 households in Satnapur eligible for the rations. Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half-starved (above, holding his useless ration card), has gone 15 months without anything from the village’s Fair Price Shop, which is supposed to sell the food at modest rates. It hasn’t sold a lick, thanks to the biggest food heist in India’s history.

Although India’s budget for food and storage keeps growing, to a record $13 billion last year, most of the nation’s hungry aren’t being fed: About 900 million Indians eat less than the government-recommended minimums. One-fifth of adults and almost half of children younger than 5 suffer from malnourishment, in part because local food prices have spiked more than 70 percent in five years. The Food Corp. of India, a public distribution system for subsidized commodities, has been the country’s primary weapon against widespread starvation since 1965, but it has failed to distribute India’s bumper harvests to its poor. After accounting for food rot, only 41 percent of grains set aside for the underprivileged reached Indian households in 2005, according to a World Bank study commissioned by the government but withheld until last year. Within the state of Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district, where Kishen’s village is located, 100 percent of the food meant for the poor was stolen during a three-year period ending in 2007, according to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation. Across Uttar Pradesh, as much as $14.5 billion in food went missing during the past 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Only miles from starving children sits a vast food stockpile meant to feed themPhotograph by Sanjit Das/BloombergOnly miles from starving children sits a vast food stockpile meant to feed them

The scam was simple, says Javeed Ahmad, the CBI officer leading its investigation: Often using dummy firms, local officials paid the national government the subsidized prices for the food—as little as one-tenth of the market rate—then sold it to private companies at market prices and pocketed the difference. Poor Indians seeking rations at their local Fair Price Shop would find a locked door, Ahmad says, or be told to “buzz off” and return the following month. By 2007, this was standard practice in at least 30 of Uttar Pradesh’s 71 districts, according to an affidavit filed in the high court in Allahabad, one of the biggest cities in India’s most populous state.

As with many scams involving politicians in India, no one has been punished for the food heists, despite five overlapping probes, some of which date back seven years. In addition to the perennially underfunded CBI, investigators include the federal Economic Offences Wing and several divisions of state police often beholden to corrupt lawmakers. “None of these agencies have the manpower, the willpower, or even the political support needed to investigate a theft of this size, this nature, and this breadth,” says Vishwanath Chaturvedi, a union leader who petitioned the government to examine food thefts in 2005.

Last December, Chaturvedi introduced the CBI to a whistle-blower who fingered Uttar Pradesh Food Minister Raja Bhaiya. In unrelated cases, Raja Bhaiya has been charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, and electoral fraud, though he has never been convicted. The whistle-blower, Rajiv Yadav, a former public-relations official for the food minister, has provided sworn statements to the Delhi High Court and turned over a ledger that he says he and Raja Bhaiya kept to track money collected from local officials involved in the scam, amounting to roughly $200,000 a week. According to the ledger, the food minister’s wife received approximately $20 million over an 18-month period between 2005 and 2007.

“I never for one moment felt scared that I would get caught,” Yadav says. “If I hadn’t come forward, no one would ever have known this was happening.” Though he has gone into hiding in New Delhi, he says testifying has granted him a measure of peace. Through his office, Raja Bhaiya and his wife declined to comment, though another spokesman dismissed Yadav’s claims as a personal vendetta in an interview with Indian newsmagazine Tehelka. The minister, who has denied the other allegations against him in public speeches, hasn’t been charged with any involvement in the food scam. He won reelection in Pratapgarh District in March.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-06/indias-poor-starve-as-politicians-steal-their-food
 
Let them starve, they shouldn't exist in the first place, their negligent parents brought them into existence knowing full well they aren't financially capable of raising a child and of all countries in India. So let them have a taste of natural selection.
 
Let them starve, they shouldn't exist in the first place, their negligent parents brought them into existence knowing full well they aren't financially capable of raising a child and of all countries in India. So let them have a taste of natural selection.

Have u ever though of consulting a Psychiatrist?

Chal koi nai...Tujhe aise khushi milti hai to God bless u....I hope in Pakistan, every one gets their share of bread...

@topic, Well, i feel this generation of leaders are incompetent (not all of them) and have no idea how badly they are damaging multicultural society of India by using vote bank politics...Hopefully next generation of politicians will bring up change, i am pretty sure...Still we are an 65 years Old nation and there are many things for us Indians to be proud of...We have come a long way but a lot has to be done....

Overcoming poverty in rural areas is one of the biggest challenge and will take more time...
 
Goverments fault for not educating people. But feeding them is totally pointless now, if you feed them then how they going to learn their lesson o_O...instead of feeding them, we should donate condoms.
 
repost?

GOI need to face the issue instead of shoving around.
 
Sometimes i feel forced sterilization during emergency was a good idea
 
Have u ever though of consulting a Psychiatrist?

Chal koi nai...Tujhe aise khushi milti hai to God bless u....I hope in Pakistan, every one gets their share of bread...

@topic, Well, i feel this generation of leaders are incompetent (not all of them) and have no idea how badly they are damaging multicultural society of India by using vote bank politics...Hopefully next generation of politicians will bring up change, i am pretty sure...Still we are an 65 years Old nation and there are many things for us Indians to be proud of...We have come a long way but a lot has to be done....

Overcoming poverty in rural areas is one of the biggest challenge and will take more time...

Whats wrong with what he said? Its brutal but its true. Having children is not your fundamental right and should not resort to it if you don't have the means to feed them. Just look around...while upper class, middle class, lower middle class have 1 or 2 children and concentrate all their efforts to raise them and give them a proper education and upbringing, the poor goes on producing 'cricket teams' and then whine that they cannot feed them.
 
poor goes on producing 'cricket teams' and then whine that they cannot feed them.
I don't want to say this but this is problem is mostly amoung lower class indian muslims most of those idiots reject family planning measures just because they think its unislamic
 
The career choice of being a "Politician" seems to attract all the lowest dregs of humanity into it.
 
only solution is to kill all elites of india.


Yeah because some people who cannot even afford one square meal a day cannot keep their dick inside their pants.
 

Back
Top Bottom