Feeding The Dead Under PDS Costs State Heavily: CAG
Of these 83,545 ineligible cards, the CAG identified 309 instances where persons claimed rations in the names of deceased individuals, causing huge losses to the exchequer.
HYDERABAD: With no proper mechanism to identify fake, ineligible, and deceased persons, the state government incurs losses of hundreds of crores every year. Even after ration card holders died, fraudsters continued claiming rations monthly.
The CAG report for the period ended March 2022, tabled in the Assembly, revealed that 83,545 ineligible and deceased persons continued availing benefits due to the absence of any detection mechanism. In a major expose of irregularities and mismanagement in the civil supplies department, the report found no periodic validation or updating of ration cards, leading to irregular expenditure of ₹139.16 crore in 2021-22 alone.
Of these 83,545 ineligible cards, the CAG identified 309 instances where persons claimed rations in the names of deceased individuals, causing huge losses to the exchequer.
An audit scrutiny of civil supplies department records on National Food Security Act implementation from 2019 to 2022 uncovered a lack of mechanisms for identifying ineligible beneficiaries and updating the ration card database, resulting in massive irregular and wasteful expenditure.
Citing data provided by the commissioner of civil supplies, the CAG noted that 5,82,256 ineligible ration card holders drew 17,985.387 metric tonnes of rice in 2020-21 and 19,690.906 metric tonnes in 2021-22 (including under Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana). Since these holders were ineligible, supplying PDS rice led to ₹124.38 crore in expenditure — ₹84.20 crore borne by the Centre and ₹40.18 crore by the state.
The report identified 16,218 deceased persons in 2020-21 and 25,320 in 2021-22 remained in the database, allowing rations to be drawn posthumously. This non-deletion enabled the lift of 938.52 MT of rice in 2020-21 and 2,216.53 MT in 2021-22.
The CAG also observed that, despite some ration cards listing only one beneficiary, 309 persons drew rations from them between 2020 and 2022. The department's failure to periodically update the database, combined with absent checks at Points of Sale (PoS), enabled suspected fraudulent lifting of subsidized rice, resulting in a net loss of ₹10.78 crore.
