Fine, jail for ineligible ration cardholders refusing to toe the line

Thiruvananthapuram: The Food and Civil Supplies Department has initiated measures to recover the benefits availed by well-off families who obtained ration cards meant for BPL households by furnishing false information or concealment of the facts.

Legal action will be initiated against those who refuse to pay up. The offence is punishable with a prison term up to three months and penalties.

The offenders will have to refund the market price of ration that they had withdrawn since March 2018. They will be asked to pay back the cost of rice at Rs 29.81 and wheat at Rs 20.68 per kilogram. The ineligible beneficiaries will have to replace the existing priority cards with the non-priority ones.

According to the Food and Civil Supplies Department, out of the 80.71 lakh card holders in the state, at least 10 lakh persons are ineligible for subsidised food grains under the public distribution system.

As many as 80,000 government servants who had managed to cover their names as beneficiaries in the National Food Security Act (NFSA) had been excluded from the list. All the seventy-four taluk supply officers in the state are currently busy weeding out ineligible beneficiaries. There are strict instructions to serve notice on at least 2,500 illegal cardholders in each taluk on a monthly basis. The general public can also contact the Civil Supply officials to help them identify the ineligible beneficiaries.

The priority list would exclude people in possession of more than one acre of land, house of more than 1,000 square feet in area and a four-wheeler commercial vehicle.

Those who managed to get their name enrolled in the list of beneficiaries fraudulently had been asked to surrender their ration cards before December 31, 2017. Legal action has been initiated against those who refused to do so.