The FIRs were lodged over the last three days against fair price shop owners and others allegedly involved in replacing Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries with those of imposters to divert ration. The FIRs were lodged over the last three days against fair price shop owners and others allegedly involved in replacing Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries with those of imposters to divert ration.

The food and civil supplies department has got 22 FIRs registered after an ongoing inquiry exposed large-scale misuse of Aadhaar cards to divert grains meant for the poor through the Public Distribution Service (PDS). The FIRs were lodged over the last three days against fair price shop owners and others allegedly involved in replacing Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries with those of imposters to divert ration, in eight districts of Uttar Pradesh. So far, three people have been arrested in Aligarh district.

An internal probe by the department had found that 1.86 lakh such transactions took place in the months of May, June and July this year. The internal probe was ordered after the department received complaints regarding such anomalies in some districts.

According to information provided by the food and civil supplies department, the Aadhaar number of genuine beneficiaries were replaced in 43 districts and involvement of 950 fair price shops was detected. A total 99 teams were formed to probe the matter.

The FIRs were registered in Gautam Budh Nagar, Muzaffarnagar, Shamli, Agra, Mathura, Aligarh, Lalitpur and Allahabad. The maximum number of FIRs (seven), were lodged in Muzaffarnagar, according to department records.

“For example, if 100 beneficiaries do not come to take ration at a fair price shop, the Aadhaar number of the first person would be changed with that of someone else. The ration would be diverted after which the original Aadhaar number was re-entered in the records. The same process was being repeated with the second person in the list, and so on. This way, the ration of all those people was being taken out one by one, using a single Aadhaar number,” said Commissioner of the state food and supplies department Alok Kumar.

He added, “The system was not detecting this because people do not take all of their ration at one time. They use their Aadhaar number multiple times. The matter came to light after we received some complaints. We ran our data with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) database to find out the Aadhaar numbers which were used multiple times. Now after registering the FIRs, we have to take corrective action so that this is not repeated. We also have to recover the amount and initiate departmental action against our staff involved in this.”

“Now we have started keeping track of the data continuously and will know immediately if any Aadhaar number is replaced to get ration. The inquiry so far has confirmed that the fraud has happened with the accounts of only those who were not taking the benefit of the scheme,” he said.

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