A scheme to run community kitchen for the poor on the recommendation of a Central Vigilance Committee (CVC) set up under the chairmanship of Justice (retired) D P Wadhwa has got “poor” response from different ministries.
The Supreme Court-appointed committee has mooted the scheme for providing cooked meal to the economically deprived section of the society surviving at city hospitals, bus stops, collectorates, etc., at a nominal cost or even free with the help from corporates and public sector units under the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme.
In an effort to get financial help to meet administrative expenditures like infrastructure, fuel, utensils, the committee sent letters to various ministries but could get a response from the Steel Ministry only.
“The CVC, therefore, addressed letters to secretaries of various ministries to motivate the corporations working under their control to participate in this endeavour. As per the information from the CVC, the response from the ministries, in this connection, has been very poor. Only Ministry of Steel has intimated that the matter is being examined and the decision taken in this regard will be intimated shortly,” the Centre told the Supreme Court.
In an affidavit, a senior official of the department of food and public distribution informed the apex court that community kitchens have been set up in districts Vijayanagram, Vishakhapatanam and Tehri Garhwal (Uttrakhand).
The department also told a bench of justices Dalveer Bhandari and Dipak Misra that it has sent a proposal by the committee for allocation of 1227.4 quintals of food grains per month for one year for the community kitchen scheme to the “competent authority for approval”.
The apex court was hearing a PIL filed by People’s Union for Civil Liberties alleging large-scale corruption and irregularities in the Public Distribution System (PDS) mechanism.
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