And in the meantime, all the weaknesses of the Public Distribution System, to correct which Chidambram was going to revert later in his Budget of four years ago, continue unabated, all the leakages continue unchecked. In its report of April 2005 on the Targeted Public Distribution System, the Planning Commission records some of these ills:

•The implementation of TPDS is plagued by targeting errors, prevalence of ghost cards and unidentified households;

•Though the off-take per household has shown some improvement under TPDS, yet only about 57% of the Below Poverty Line households are covered by it;

•Leakages and diversions of subsidized grains are large and only about 42% of subsidized grains issued from the Central Pool reach the target group;

•Over 36% of the budgetary subsidies on food are siphoned off the supply chain: in several states, much higher proportions are siphoned off – 42% in Assam, 82% in Bihar, 42% in Gujarat, 56% in Haryana, 43% in Karnataka, 62% in Madhya Pradesh, 76% in Punjab, 61% in UP;

•Another 21% of the food subsidy reaches households that are above the Poverty Line;

•The cost of income transfer to the poor through PDS is much higher than that through other modes.

The Comptroller and Auditor General released his own findings in 2006. In his Performance Audit on Management of Foodgrains, the CAG concluded, first of all, ‘The results of the 59th round of the National Sample Survey of NSSO revealed that: almost 71 per cent of farmers had not even heard of the concept of Minimum Support Price. Even in Haryana and Punjab (which together contribute 56 per cent of all rice procured and 85 per cent of all wheat procured in the country), 37 per cent and 38 per cent of farmers respectively were unaware of MSP; and almost 81 per cent of farmers were effectively unaware of how to use the MSP programme.’ Second, the Audit once again laid bare all the holes with which we are familiar:

... contd.