Times of India: Monday September, 12, 2011.
AMBALA: The district administration here has decided to recover money from the families who allegedly enjoyed the benefits of below poverty line (BPL) cards on the basis of forged documents.
The administration has canceled 308 such BPL cards which were allegedly made by fraudulent means by these otherwise well-off families. Notably, this development is an outcome of a TOI report about ineligible families getting BPL cards and facilities. TOI had published a report from Ambala titled "7 of ice-factory owner family in BPL list" dated January 3, 2011. After this, a high level inquiry was marked by the ministry and the district administration made an appeal to the non-eligible people to surrender their cards. In this process 700 people have surrendered their BPL ration cards till now. Parallel to this voluntarily discloser, DC Ambala also made an inquiry to check how many non-eligible people did not surrender their cards. During this exercise, 308 cases were found in both rural and urban areas.
Sources said that some well-off people got BPL cards made to enjoy the benefit of having information under RTI Act without paying a penny as BPL card holder are exempted from paying an fee for seeking information.
DC Ambala Sameer Pal Sarow said, "The district administration is no more soft on this issue. We have waited enough to allow people to voluntarily surrender their wrongly procured cards. Now I have ordered to recover money from those illegally using BPL cards. If anybody does not pay, a case will be registered against him."
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