Bhubaneswar, Sept. 5: The issue of alleged mismanagement of rice returned to haunt the Odisha government in the Assembly today with the Congress-led Opposition accusing the state of having given below poverty line (BPL) people less than the Centre’s allocated quota.

Though newly inducted food and civil supply minister Pratap Keshari Deb refuted the allegation and defended the state government’s role, an unimpressed Opposition staged a walk-out on the issue.

The Opposition alleged that the state was giving only 25kg of rice to each BPL family though the Centre was releasing 35kg for each of them.

The issue was in focus last month when Union minister of chemicals and fertilisers Srikant Jena said the Naveen Patnaik government’s mismanagement of subsidised food grains provided by the Centre resulted in a loss to the targeted beneficiaries.

Raising the issue in the House today, leader of the Opposition Bhupinder Singh said the state government was misleading the House by citing wrong figures about the number of BPL beneficiaries.

Defending the government, the minister said the state government was receiving allocation of 97,131 metric tonnes (MT) of BPL rice from the Centre every month for 27.76 lakh families only. But, the state has to distribute BPL rice to 42.32 lakh families. “That’s why, we have decided to distribute 25kg of rice instead of 35kg to each family,” the minister said, adding that if 35kg of rice was distributed to each BPL family, the state would require an additional amount of 50,989.385MT.

The minister also said the allocation of 97,131MT of rice received from the Centre was not adequate to meet the requirement of 42.32 lakh families even at 25kg per family every month. “An additional quantity of 8,669.275MT rice per month is met from the state pool,” he said.

Moreover, the Centre has been allocating subsidised rice for 7.42 lakh of above poverty line (APL) families of eight KBK districts since 2002 and they are getting 35kg of rice.

On the issue of higher number of families under the BPL, Deb said there had been no survey of the families after 1997-98. That survey had pegged the number of BPL families in the state at 48.58 lakh. However, the Centre disputed the figure. The Planning Commission drastically reduced the number of BPL families of the state to 32.98 lakh.