People being deprived of flour subsidy

The government of Punjab is giving wheat to the owners of flour mills at subsidised rates, but the people are not getting flour at the notified subsidised rate of Rs65 per kilogram.

Consequently, people are forced to buy flour at Rs100 per kilogram. According to sources, 541,200 kilograms of wheat is supplied to 41 flour mills in Sheikhupura district on a daily basis under the subsidy given by the Punjab government.

The flour mills are obliged to provide 70 percent of the supplied wheat in the form of flour at the notified subsidised rate. According to this, 41 flour mills must supply about 35,000 bags of flour of 10 kilograms each.

A total of 493 sale points have been set up across the district to sell such subsidised flour. However, at some of these sale points, the said subsidized flour is not available at all, while at others a few bags of flour are being sold at government rates and the remaining bags of flour are being sold in black.

The subsidised flour bags provided by the mills is put back into normal bags named after various flour mills and sold in the open market at Rs1,500 a bag of 15 kilograms each. No effective system of monitoring of flour sale points has been set up.

No officer is ready to listen to the demands of the common citizens over nonavailability of subsidised flour and its illegal sale in the open market. Many complaints were made by the people with the district administration and the food department, but no action could be taken. In this regard, this correspondent visited some of the sale points, but none of them had flour available at the government rate.

When the owners of the sale points were asked about the unavailability of such flour bags, they said that even though their names were there in the official list of the sale points, yet they had not been provided with subsidised flour by the mills. Owners of a few sale points on the other hand alleged that they only got a few bags of subsidised flour while sale of a much higher number in their name was reported in the official statistics.

“We have complained many a times, but no action has been taken due to which the people are not getting the same at the government rate,” the owners of the sale points said. On the other hand, the tandoor owners are being allegedly pressured by the district administration to sell roti at the approved government rate of Rs10 a piece. They made it clear to the district administration that they did not have access to subsidised flour.

The public circles have demanded of the Chief Minister of Punjab, Pervaiz Elahi, to take action against what the people alleged “embezzlement of wheat and flour subsidy” provided by the Punjab government. In this regard, while talking to The Express Tribune, the former PML-N provincial minister, Mian Khalid Mehmood, said that the Punjab government had failed badly in providing relief to the poor.

He said there was no check and balance system, and the district officers were confined to their offices. “We had an effective system of check and balance during our tenure, and strong action used to be taken on citizens’ complaints,” he added. Mian Khalid Mehmood said that the total population of Sheikhupura was 3.4 million, and if government flour was judiciously delivered to the sale points then this flour crisis could be avoided.