Lucknow, May 29 -- They told us the ration was finished, but we now know it was stolen in our name," says Rajwati Devi, a 62-year-old widow from Meerut's urban slum, her voice heavy with disbelief and anger. "Why should only poor people suffer while officials and dealers get rich off our hunger?"
Her anguish echoes the sentiment of thousands of families across Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly, Agra and Meerut divisions who have now discovered they were systematically deprived of their rightful food supplies. A damning investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has uncovered one of the most extensive foodgrain frauds in recent memory - a scam in which a single Aadhaar card was fraudulently used to divert subsidised rations to near...