PDS rice from Bihar makes way to Karnal mill, 758 bags seized

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, October 4

Sacks of rice meant for the poor and bearing the mark of the Bihar State Food and Supplies Department were recovered during a raid at a rice mill in Karnal on Thursday.

It was learnt that a rice mill in Rishi Nagar, Karnal, had brought a stock of rice under the Public Distribution System (PDS) for recycling into the procurement process. Subsequently, Karnal DC Aditya Dahiya formed a team led by SDM Narinder Malik to raid the mill.

During the raid, the team recovered 758 bags of rice with the mark of the Bihar State Food and Supplies Department. These bags were stocked with other bags of rice.

Ram Niwas, Additional Chief Secretary (ACS), Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs, said the mill owner was asked to produce purchase documents of the rice recovered from his mill, but he failed to furnish any.

“The mill owner will be booked. We will write to the Secretary, Food and Supplies Department, Bihar informing him that PDS rice from his state was finding way to rice mills in Haryana,” he said.

The ACS further said the entire stock of rice stocked in the mill had been seized and a process to blacklist the firm would be initiated on Friday. “We will not give paddy to the Rishi Nagar mill for custom milling this season,” Niwas said.

A news report, “Rice for poor finds way to Haryana mills” published in The Tribune on September 20 highlighted that the PDS rice meant for the poor allegedly landed in some rice mills of Haryana, where it was likely to be recycled into the milling process for this year’s paddy by showing bogus procurement of the produce.

The authorities had recovered 1.25 lakh bags of PDS rice from three rice millers of Karnal that time.

Sources say the practice of recycling the PDS rice into the procurement process has been underway in Haryana and Punjab for the past several years, denying subsidised rice to the poor and, in the process, inflating the procurement figures.

Sources said with an annual production of 40 to 45 lakh MT of paddy, Haryana, on paper, has been procuring 58 to 60 lakh MT because of bogus purchases shown by millers against PDS rice already stored by them ahead of the milling season.