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| June 25, 2005 | Saturday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 17, 1426 |
Corruption in distribution of wheat alleged
CHITRAL, June 24: A district government official has accused the local food department officials of being involved in corruption in distribution of wheat from government godowns.
Talking to Dawn, the chairman of the district council’s standing committee on food, Syed Sardar Hussain Shah, said that poor people in the remote district was being exploited by the corrupt officials of the food department.
He said that wheat stored in the department godowns was hazardous for health and unfit for human consumption and added that last year the department had auctioned thousands of bags of wheat which had been declared inconsumable.
Now, the food officials had replaced the new stock by the condemned one and supplied infested wheat to the consumers of upper part of the district, he alleged and said that the sample collected and preserved by the district coordination officer provided proof of it.
He said that in the valleys of Laspur and Yarkhoon in upper Chitral, 100 kilogrammes of wheat were sold by the department officials for Rs1,150 against the fixed rate of Rs1,000. He said that to augment the weight of the wheat, pebbles, gravels and dirt were mixed in the grain.
He said that some years ago, some officials had been caught red-handed while contaminating wheat but, due to unknown reasons, they had gotten scot free and still continued the practice.
He further alleged that bungling was going on in transporting wheat to the far-flung godowns of the district. “In Government record, thousands of wheat bags are shown as transported to the distant godowns but actually these are sold at earlier stations and amount of fare is withdrawn from exchequer.”
He added that the mode of corruption had recently reached its zenith despite the claims of the NWFP government that it was checking corruption.
Mr Hussain warned that he would organize a protest demonstration and show the sample of the contaminated wheat to the prime minister on the occasion of his visit to Shandur next month.
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