Beware! There could be a terrorist in your ration office

Thanks to the shockingly messy record keeping ways of the Ration Office's warehouse in Parvati, officials are unable to explain how suspected Bangladeshi national managed to get a card issued against his name

Beware! There could be a terrorist in your ration office

Thousands of identity papers and ration cards of citizens living in Yerwada lie stacked randomly on rickety shelves, held loosely in dusty tattered files, and strewn carelessly on the floor of a godown in Shivaji Nagar gathering dust.

Vital documents
These are documents that citizens are required to submit to the rationing office to obtain ration cards, which are, in turn, used to obtain passports, an important document that can be used and abused by unscrupulous elements, including terrorists and spies.

MiD DAY attempted to check the documents of a Bangladeshi named Mohammed Sadique Siddique (name changed) who, because he had a ration card, could have easily acquired a passport. Indian intelligence agencies are hunting for Siddique who has disappeared without a trace.u00a0

The ration card, incidentally, has neither the name of the rationing shop nor does it have Siddique's addressu00a0
This reporter made several unsuccessful visits to the office of Rationing Superintendent V K Vir foru00a0 nearly three months and asked the officials to check if they had indeed issued a ration card to a person by the name of Mohammed Sadique Siddique.

"During the Lok Sabha elections, the entire rationing office was converted into a polling booth. The records were shifted twice before being finally dumped here," Vir explained.u00a0u00a0u00a0

Storage or dump?
MiD DAY learnt, on a visit to the Rationing office's Shivaji Nagar warehouse, how the way in which the officialsu00a0 store documents, makes it nearly impossible for officials to answer the reporter's queries.u00a0u00a0u00a0

In the Shivaji Nagar warehouse, there are over 2,000 gunny bags containing ration cards, applications, affidavits, context registers and ration shop records that have been carelessly dumped like garbage (see pic).

Abhi saab nahi hai
R K Jadhav, an official at the Rationing Office, who is in charge of the Yerwada region, repeatedly asked her assistants to help locate Siddique's documents with little success.

"We will have to check registers numbered 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, and 24 to locate Siddique's ration shop and then trace his identity, but the records are currently locked and the person who has the keys has not reported to work. Please come back on July 30," Jadhav told this reporter yesterday, on what was incidentally his 15th visit to her office.