Chennai: Complaints have surfaced alleging that rice sacks dispatched to ration shops in Tamil Nadu are being sent with reduced weight, potentially leading to a large-scale financial irregularity.
Tamil Nadu supplies free rice to about 2.25 crore ration card holders, requiring around 3.63 lakh tonnes per month. Of this, the Centre supplies 2.05 lakh tonnes free and 92,000 tonnes at Rs 8.30 per kg, while the remaining quantity is procured by the state at Rs 22.50 per kg.
Rice purchased from the Food Corporation of India is stored in warehouses of the Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Corporation and then transported by lorries to ration shops through cooperative societies. The rice is sent in 50-kg gunny bags, and with the bag weight included, each sack is expected to weigh 50 kg and 650 grams.
However, complaints allege that each shop receives sacks that are short by about 1 to 3 kg. As not all card holders collect rice every month, the actual monthly distribution is said to average around 3 lakh tonnes.
If the average shortfall is assumed at 1 kg per sack, the deficit would be about 60 lakh kg across roughly 60 lakh sacks. At an open market price of Rs 40 per kg, this works out to an estimated Rs 24 crore per month, or about Rs 300 crore a year.
