Dear editor,

From the pages of MEL, I came to know of the campaign by LRS samitis to ensure the right to food for the working masses.

In my view, corruption is integral to the way the PDS is organized at present. The owner of a ration shop is supposed to keep his shop open 8 hours a day, 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening, 6 days a week, give the full quota of foodgrains to the card holders without any adulteration and at the correct price. If a ration shop owner catering to the targeted PDS system actually did so, he will make a commission of merely Rs 800 a month!

Will any of us take a license for ration shops to earn Rs 800 a month?  With this meager money, forget about the labour of the ration shop licensee, he cannot meet the costs of renting the shop or maintaining a godown.

The ration shop owner makes up his monies by giving 8kg of rice instead of 10 kg. He will take 10-25 paise per kg over and above the prescribed rate. He will carryout adulteration, selling the good foodgrains in the black market, and selling rotting stuff to the BPL card holders. He will open his shop once in 15 days, so that there are long lines, people are desperate to take whatever they get, and many genuine ration card holders simply do not avail of their quotas. He has a number of dummy cards in whose quota he withdraws rations and sells in the black market.

The government, the officials and bourgeois politicians are all aware of this situation. They like this situation because they force the shop owners to bribe them. Government places big advertisements in the media to make out how it is so concerned about ensuring that the working masses get help from the PDS, but this is just crocodile tears to fool the gullible.

I have not written this letter in defence of the corrupt ration shop owners. I just want to explain that the present system has corruption built into it.

Mansoor Ali, Uttar Pradesh