Many years ago, author Arundhati Roy highlighted the issue in the only manner she could — she said that while the government didn’t want to spend money on the poor, it had no problems spending huge sums on feeding rats. She was alluding to the justification given by government officials on various occasions for why there was such a huge discrepancy between the quantity of grains procured and the Food Corporation of India’s stocks — the rats ate it, was a stock reply. What happened in Panaji the other day beats this hollow. In a matter before the Panaji bench of the Bombay High Court, the local government’s lawyer said ants had eaten up 24 kg of charas (cannabis) from the official godown where it was kept after being seized from drug traffickers. The state is prosecuting various Goa policemen who are charged with links to the local narcotics mafia and are suspected of selling back the drugs they seized. Even if white ants had eaten the drugs, Goa’s home minister was quoted as saying, the police should have been checking the storeroom regularly.
Ajay Khanna, New Delhi
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