Poor starve as politicians steal Rs 80,649 crore worth of food in Uttar Pradesh

India has run the world's largest public food distribution system for the poor since the failure of two successive monsoons led to the creation of the Food Corporation of India in 1965. The government last year spent a record $13 billion buying and storing commodities such as wheat and rice, and expects that figure to grow this year.

Yet 21% of all adults and almost half of India's children under 5 years old are still malnourished. About 900 million Indians already eat less than government-recommended minimums. As local food prices climbed more than 70% over the past five years, dependence on subsidies has grown.

From the government warehouses, millions of tonne are dispatched monthly to states, which are supposed to distribute them at subsidised prices to the poor. About 10% of India's food rots or is lost before it can be distributed, while some 3 million tonne of wheat in buffer stocks is more than two years old, according to the government.

Even after accounting for the wastage, only 41% of the food set aside for feeding the poor reached households nationwide in 2005, according to a World Bank study commissioned by the government and released last year.

In Uttar Pradesh, where the minister of food stands charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and electoral fraud, the diversion was more than 80% in 2005, the World Bank report said.

Fully 100% of the food meant for the poor in Kishen's home district was stolen during a three-year period, according to India's Central Bureau of Investigation, the country's leading anti-corruption agency. When Kishen sought his monthly quota at the village's fair price shop, as the ration stores are called, they'd either find a locked door or be told to return the following month, said Javeed Ahmad, the CBI officer leading the agency's investigation of the scam for more than three years.

"Who is a person who holds a below poverty line ration card? A person of no influence," he said. "If he shows up at the fair price shop and there is no below-poverty-line wheat, you can just tell him to buzz off."