Govt failed to act against graft in ICDS

Women in anganwadis ended up selling food supplied to them as cattle fodder

The Department of Women and Child Development (DWCD) was spending more than Rs 600 crore annually to provide nutritious food to children, pregnant and lactating mothers, and adolescent girls.

But the Department failed to act when consistent reports from anganwadi centres streamed in about rejection of the food by children and mothers, which they sold as cattle feed in the market.

For, the officials of the Department themselves were hand in glove in what was an elaborate system of deception.

Three officials - IAS officer and the then Director of the Department Shamla Iqbal, Deputy Director Usha Patwari and Assistant Director Muniraju - are now being investigated by the Lokayukta police for their involvement in the scam involving the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).

If not for the tacit co-operation of these officials, who were responsible for the direct implementation of the scheme, then Christy Friedgram Industries (CFI), the company that supplied food to anganwadis, would never have been able to get away with blatant flouting of rules.

Former employees of CFI, who approached this paper, spoke about how the company manipulated the indents given for fulfilling an order and dumped food in anganwadis, which was not being used by the children, but made sure they collected not only money for the raw grain materials, but also the profits that should have gone to the Mahila Supplementary Nutrition Production and Training Centres (MSPTCs) employees.

The MSPTCs had been set up to process and mix food in particular blends and then package it to be sent to anganwadis.

And women working at these centres were supposed to get a share of the profits, something the semi-literate and illiterate women never realised or even saw.

At the block level is an official of the DWCD called the Child Development Project Officer (CDPO) who places an indent with the MSPTCs stating their requirement for a particular type of food. But CFI never supplied it accordingly.

For example, if an indent specified they needed 10 metric tonnes each of two kinds of food products, then CFI would supply 20 metric tonnes  — five metric tonnes of one type of food and 15 metric tonnes of another kind. Each kind of food was being sold at separate rates.

So, in most cases, the food that cost more would be supplied in greater numbers, so that CFI could make more money.

This was regardless of the fact that whatever the type of food, consumption by children and women were dismally low, if not non-existent.

All this was cleared by the officials of the department, starting from the CDPOs, and cheques were issued to CFI, once again without providing a break-up of the amount being charged for different kinds of food.

The former employees of Christy said two registers were being maintained by CFI. One showing the fudged records for external audit, and another with actual transactions.

In fact, according to an ex-employee of CFI, the company was charging Rs 45 per kg of prepared food, way higher than the actual cost of production. This was being sold by the women as cattle fodder for anywhere between Rs 3 and Rs 10 per kg.
 
So, the government incurred heavy losses without ever fulfilling the fundamental requirement of supplementary nutrition to a section of society that was in dire need of it.