Third-party audit of grain procurement since 2003

Chandigarh : The state government has finally ordered a special third-party independent audit for physical and financial verification of foodgrains procured by it in the past 14 years.
The Department of Food and Civil Supplies has floated a Request for Proposal, seeking third-party auditors for the verification of foodgrains procured between April 1, 2003, and March 31, 2017. “The entire burden of Rs 31,000-crore legacy food credit account settlement that the Punjab government is to bear, and which put the state’s finances in a tailspin, is because of the alleged mismanagement of the procurement process during these 14 years,” official sources said.
The sources said while the Request for Proposal would be available from December 1, they were looking at national audit agencies and companies, to do the audit. The bids for this would have to be submitted by December 21. The technical bids and later financial bids would be decided by the end of December. Having inherited an “ailing economy”, the cash-strapped Capt Amarinder Singh government had decided to go in for an audit of how such a huge liability could be allowed to rise, look into the gap between the cost of buying foodgrains and reimbursement by the Central procurement agencies and fix responsibility of whosoever was involved in this.
It was to settle this legacy food credit account with the Centre that the previous Akali-BJP government had raised a loan. Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal has often raised the issue that though initially the Centre was willing to share and take over Rs 10,000 crore of this loan, the previous government did not bother and took over the entire responsibility of paying Rs 31,000 crore. He has often said since the Punjab government procured foodgrains on behalf of the Union government, the latter should share the debt burden with Punjab. The new ruling dispensation, which will have to repay this loan, has accused the previous government of burdening the state with the loan, just days before the election results were announced. This loan alone puts an additional burden of Rs 3,240 crore as debt servicing liability each year.