SC extends tenure of Justice Wadhwa Committee
The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended by another six months the tenure of the Justice Wadhwa Committee formed to go into various issues relating to the Public Distribution System (PDS).
A bench comprising justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma extended the time of the committee headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice D P Wadhwa.
The apex court had formed the committee by an order of 12th July, 2006.
As per the order, the committee, headed by Justice Wadhwa, was also to be assisted by a Commissioner N C Saxena.
The court's direction came after senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, appearing for the People's Union for Civil Liberty, and Additional Solicitor General Mohan Parasaran informed the court that the term of the committee has ended and requested extension.
The Wadhwa committee has so far submitted various reports in the PUCL matter on right to food since April 2001.
The committee has studied the PDS system of various states and had said procurement and distribution of foodgrains of PDS is built on corruption and its benefits to the poor are low.
It had also suggested revamping of the entire system with modern technology such as biometric identification.
The bench also flayed the government for following the 2004 criterion for indentifying BPL families.
The 2004 criterion stipulated that those with daily spending of less than Rs 12 in rural area and Rs 17 in urban areas would fall in the BPL category.
"Do you think that in 2011, Rs 17 and Rs 12 are a realistic figure seeing the current rate of inflation. Even the government of India has increased the salaries of its employees twice in a year. How can it be realistic?" the bench said, adjourning the matter till 4th April.
During last hearing on 16th March, the bench had asked the Centre as to why the tax payers' money should be used for subidising food grains under the public distribution system (PDS) for those who are above the poverty line.
"We don't understand the logic as to why a person, let us say earning an annual income of Rs 10 crore, should be (given) subsidy (by using) the tax payers' money for distribution of the grains.”
"We can understand the necessity of subsidising those who belong to the AAY (Antodaya Anna Yojana) and BPL families should be given the benefits, but why should others be given the benefit from the limited resources?" the bench had asked.
It had also asked the government to explain the steps taken by it for computerisation of the PDS delivery mechanism to ensure fool-proof implementation of the welfare measure.
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