BENGALURU: Lakshmi Kanthamma is 87 and lives alone. She can barely walk or hear, and remains largely confined to her bed in a small dingy room in Kala Halli near Halasuru, Karnataka.
Sometimes she crawls on her hands out of her bed and is mentally stable only at times. This octogenarian was recently appointed as Vigilance Committee member of a fair price shop at Kala Halli in what can be deemed only as mockery of an attempt to streamline the Public Distribution System.
The Food and Civil Supplies department randomly selected three women of Kala Halli out of 60 cardholders here to constitute a vigilance team for Angala Parameshwari fair price shop, a mandatory condition for all ration shops as per the gazette notification issued on May 31, 2016. There are 1,400 such outlets in Bengaluru and all of them must have such a team to look into grievances of the public and supervise distribution.
“Four months ago, two officials of the department came and told her to sign a form and she did so. On August 24, a notice was put at her doorstep saying she had been made a vigilance member and must conduct meetings on the 7th of every month,” says her neighbour K Parmila. Parmila, 60, out of sheer sympathy, feeds her thrice a day while Kanthamma’s houseowner has waived off her monthly rent. So how did this octogenarian, bed-ridden woman become a vigilance member? “They told me to put a signature on a form and I did it,” was Kanthamma’s response when Parmila asked her about it.
Ironically, Kanthamma has not even been able to get her measly monthly rations from the fair price shop ever since the capturing of biometric thumb impression (every three months) was made a prerequisite for BPL cardholders buying provisions.