In a shocking case revealing large-scale corruption in Public Distribution System (PDS) in Uttar Pradesh, owners of ration shops misused Aadhaar cards over 1.80 lakh times to splurge on food meant for poor people.

Hundreds of tons of ration, meant for distribution among card holders, was sold by PDS shop owners on higher price in the open market after pocketing huge amount of subsidy from the government. The Food Commissioner Alok Kumar revealed that so far the department has detected anomalies in ration shops in 43 out of 75 districts in the state. “Orders have been issued to register FIRs against PDS shops owners involved in the ration scam,” said Kumar.

The modus operandi adopted by these PDS shop owners was completely shocking. They changed the Aadhaar card numbers of ration cards holders in the Electronic Point of Sale Devices and fed new Aadhaar numbers of people known to them. The department got an alert when it received a large number of complaints of cardholders that they were not getting ration from PDS shops. An initial inquiry by National Informatics Centre (NIC) revealed that the ration was distributed to those Aadhaar cardholders who do not even have ration cards.

Maximum pilferage and loot of poor people's ration was reported from Allahabad, followed by Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Ghaziabad and even state capital Lucknow. Further probe revealed that PDS shop owners hired technical persons to change registered data and feed new Aadhaar card numbers of people known to them. After obtaining their bio-metrics, they looted the foodgrains of poor people. After conducting the transactions, they restored the original data so that anomalies were not detected.

During investigations, it was revealed that as many as 107 Aadhaar cards were used 37574 times in Allahabad, 108 Aadhaar cards used 27324 times in Meerut, 64 cards were used for 19,795 times in Muzaffarnagar, 69 cards for 16568 times in Ghazaibad etc to commit the ration shop food scam in the state.

“The probe is still on and many more PDS shops are under the scanner. We will cancel licenses of these PDS shops after registering criminal cases against those involved in the scam,” said the Food Commissioner.