An elderly woman in Chhattisgarh’s Bemetara district has gone without her government ration for about four months because official records list her as dead. Jethiya Bai of Andhiyarkhor village says she is very much alive, and the district’s Food Officer has now ordered an inquiry into her case, Patrika reported.
Jethiya Bai has made repeated trips between her village and the nearby town of Nawagarh to resolve the problem. She went to her local ration shop, visited government offices, and filed a complaint on the Chief Minister’s Helpline, according to Patrika. At each stop, she says she was passed from one office to the next without a fix, and the four months without rice have added up for a household that depends on the subsidised grain.
What happened to Jethiya Bai’s ration card?
At the ration shop, staff told Jethiya Bai that government records showed her as deceased, so she could not be given rice. She was reportedly asked to produce a birth certificate to prove she is alive, and told that a correction could only be made once a particular online portal used for ration card edits reopens, Patrika reported. The article does not say when or how she first came to be recorded as dead in the system, only that the error has stood unresolved for months despite her repeated complaints.
Frustrated by the standoff, Jethiya Bai told Patrika that if the records insist she is dead, officials should simply issue her a death certificate instead, since that would at least settle the matter one way or the other. She said she is exhausted from the back and forth between Nawagarh and her home village, with no resolution in sight and no fixed date by which the correction might go through.
Her case is not presented in the report as unique. It surfaced alongside a broader set of complaints about ration and farm records in the district, raised by a local party functionary on the same day Patrika’s Bemetara correspondent, Khyati Parihar, spoke to her at her village.
What did the district Food Officer say?
Bemetara District Food Officer Onkar Singh Thakur told Patrika he would order an inquiry into why Jethiya Bai has not been receiving her ration. He did not give a timeline for when her record would be corrected or when deliveries would resume, and no further official statement is on record beyond that commitment. Patrika’s report does not say whether the inquiry will also examine how her record came to be marked as deceased in the first place, or who will be held responsible if that turns out to be a data-entry error rather than a technical glitch.
Is this a one-off case or a wider pattern?
Bharti Gandharva, district president of the Chhattisgarh Johar Party, raised Jethiya Bai’s case alongside a broader allegation: that close to 20 percent of names have been removed from ration cards across the district. Patrika attributed this figure to Gandharva; it has not been independently confirmed by the Food Department, and no official count of affected households is on record.
Gandharva also said a ration card correction typically takes three to four months to process once a complaint is filed, a delay during which affected families miss out on their entitled grain, including any arrears that build up while the record sits uncorrected. If accurate, that timeline would match almost exactly what Jethiya Bai has already been through.
She separately alleged that paddy procurement records for roughly 20 percent of farmers in the area show reduced land area or altered crop entries, a claim that is also unverified beyond her statement to Patrika. This second complaint concerns a different government record system from the one affecting Jethiya Bai’s ration card, but Gandharva presented both as examples of the same underlying problem: local residents left to chase corrections to official data that was never theirs to fix in the first place.
Gandharva has written to Smriti Irani, the BJP’s Chhattisgarh in-charge, inviting her to visit villages and government offices in Bemetara to see the conditions directly, according to Patrika. Separately, farmers in Nawagarh are reportedly still visiting the tehsil office on their own initiative to get their land records corrected, without a stated resolution date.
What happens next
Patrika’s report does not say when Jethiya Bai’s record will be corrected or when her ration will resume. Whether Food Officer Onkar Singh Thakur’s inquiry into her individual case also looks at Gandharva’s wider claim of district-level card deletions remains to be seen, as does whether the separate paddy procurement allegation gets a response from the agriculture department.
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