On October 24, after waiting in front of a ration shop for seven hours for the dealer, Bappa Mollah, to appear and answer their queries about missing ration stocks, about 3,000 villagers went on the rampage. Police lathicharge followed. At the end of it the ration shop had been ransacked, a couple of vehicles set on fire and one child and two policemen injured. The police nabbed six protestors and issued arrest warrants against another 150.

Ever since, unsure about which ones among them are on the wanted list, the villagers from Uttarpa hamlet have been sleeping in the fields in Bithari. They shiver in winter chills while also shudder at leaving the women and children to face the brunt of police aggression. "My bones ache from the cold at night. My wife is left all alone. How long will we continue to live like this?" asks 67-year-old Hajidulla Sardar, whose son Roshan Sardar, 35, is among the six arrested.

Food rights' activists say they are observing the same pattern across the state. The authorities, in a knee-jerk reaction, are protecting the "real culprits" and persecuting the ones who have been cheated for years. "They are treating this as a law and order issue, when what they should be doing is filing criminal cases against the dealers under the Essential Commodities Act 1951 and the PDS Control Order 2001," says Anuradha Talwar, adviser to the Supreme Court on right to food.

This remote village near the Bangladesh border is one of the many in West Bengal where people have protested violently against corruption in the public distribution system (PDS) in the past one-and-a-half months. The riots started on September 16 in Bankura, one of the state's poorest districts, following allegations that for the past year ration dealers had been depriving villagers-especially above-poverty line (APL) ration card holders-of subsidized food grains and selling the grains at higher prices in the open market. It triggered violent protests in Birbhum, Burdwan, West Midnapore, Murshidabad, North 24-Paraganas and South 24-Paraganas districts. One protestor died in police firing and hundreds were arrested. Four dealers committed suicide, fearing public wrath. A recent Planning Commission inquiry found that in West Bengal Rs 1,913.76 crore of rice and wheat was stolen in the past year.

The state government has initiated damage-control measures, suspending 113 dealers, filing law-and-order violation charges against 20 and serving show-cause notices to 37 food inspectors. It has also introduced some new policies-like prominent display of grain quota at PDS shops and cash memos to all customers-to ensure transparency in the system, says food and supplies minister Paresh Chandra Adhikary. "Until preliminary investigations we can't frame any charges under the Essential Commodities Act or the PDS Control Order," he says.

West Bengal has rather exceptionally failed in its PDS compared to other states of India. It has the highest percentage (10.6) of rural households that don't get adequate food during some months of the year, according to a National Sample Survey report published earlier this year. Thirteen per cent of rural households in the state face food crisis all year long, that's second only to Assam.

In the past few years there have been several reports of starvation deaths in Murshidabad, West Midnapore and Purulia districts. "Dependence on PDS is very high in West Bengal compared to other states because though the per capita production of food in the state is high, people don't have the purchasing power to buy food," says Abhiroop Sarkar, an economist with the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, who has studied farming issues in West Bengal.

The spark that started the fire could be centre's slashing of it's monthly allocation for the APL section from 228,000 tonnes to 7,700 tonnes. State officials say that this is main reason of shortfall. Incidentally a popular Bengali film starring Mithun Chakraborty, MLA Fatakeshto is also one of the reason. The film shows villagers, led by a thug-turned-hero, attacking a corrupt ration dealer's shop. "That scene has captured the people's imagination and they are copying it", says Adhikary.

Talwar, however, points to a 2006 CAG report revealing that between 2001 and 2006, West Bengal had been lazy in procuring grains allotted to it. "(The) off-take of food grains by the APL category varied from 2 to 40 per cent in case of rice and 6 to 51 per cent in case of wheat ... while the off take of food grains for the below-poverty-line category ranged from 53 to 69 per cent," the report says. "Of the 2.1 billion kg of rice the state needs to procure locally for PDS, only 1 billion kg could be raised because farmers were getting a better price in open markets," she says.

Of the 8.35 crore ration cardholders in the state, almost 60 per cent belong to the APL category and Adhikary says "APL cardholders, who usually buy grains from the open market, are coming to the ration shops after the recent price rise and thus going on rampage".

Adds Kunal Deb, a Right to Food Network activist: "The government does not like to show it has a large BPL population, so it gives many BPL families APL designation. The bottom line: there's always demand for PDS grains, even among the APL population." Combine less supply and more demand and you have a crisis.

A classic example is the central government recognizes only 25 per cent of Kerala's 3.18 crore population as belonging to the BPL category, while the state government considers 42 per cent. Kerala bears the subsidy burden for the rest of the 17 per cent. Kerala's system was hit by the centre's Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) launched in 1997, which focussed only on families living below the poverty line (BPL).

Talwar suggests removing distributors and dealers, replacing them with self-help groups and cooperatives, and issuing digitised ration cards. The solution has to be contemplated by the government because only condemning the act of violence doesn't contain it.