BONGAIGAON, Nov 30 - Various anomalies and dishonest dealings under the food and civil supply department in Bongaigaon district have come into light through some documents that a local ration shop dealer had recently obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
Altogether 104 ration shop dealers have been distributing rations in Bongaigaon town area under the Public Distribution System (PDS). Each of these dealers has less than a thousand ration card holders. These dealers are distributing only rice and kerosene as PDS commodities to the beneficiaries.
Many new dealers in the town have been lifting PDS goods from the consumer cooperative society without any allotment in their names. They are using the names of those dealers who have either expired or have surrendered their licences to the supply department, revealed the documents obtained through the RTI Act.
In another anomaly, three members of a single family (one of whom is a college student) have been running three separate ration shops in the town. Of these three shops, one had invited some action from the department after a few local beneficiaries had complained to the administration against its owner, who had stocked PDS rice illegally during the COVID-induced lockdown, said the dealer who had filed the RTI application.
The supply department had issued many new ration shop licences in Bongaigaon town without giving any circular in public domain, which, too, is an utter breach of departmental norms, the dealers pointed out.
Meanwhile, the Bongaigaon Ration Dealers� Association has decided to submit a fresh complaint to the district administration against such anomalies, its president Nipen Das said.
�Since most of the ration shops in the town area deal with beneficiaries numbering less than one thousand, whenever any old ration shop licence is surrendered, the beneficiaries of the old shop should be attached to the nearest ration shop, so that the number of beneficiaries can increase in such shops,� Das added.
