First, fishermen are supplied only 35% kerosene of their total fuel need, as against to 85% of the total allowable fuel as per distribution laws, on the other hand few cheaters are making quick bucks by registering a non-existent boats.
This scandal is widely organised through many department and hence none share the responsibilities. It works something like this, most of the fibre boat are assembled in Veraval / Somnath, forged documents are obtained from Mamlatdar office of manufactured place, later an affidavit stating the copies as original document is submitted to Gujarat Maritime Board, this generates a call for the fisheries department for releasing a boat, this call is later used by any Tehsil office (in this case Dwarka office) to distribute kerosene, it is also believed that as there is a finite number of such forged documents, the office does distribute the kerosene on backdoor.
In the distribution chain, as per agreed norms, every fibre boar is allocated 250 Litre. Of subsidised fuel. However actual requirement for a month of fuel is around 500 Litre. Per boat per month. Actual allocation of fuel (subsidised) is only 85 Litre. This is just 35% of agreed quota and actually 15% of total fuel requirement per boat per month, this forces the fishermen to get non-subsidised fuel from market at higher cost.
Since last 10 years, Rupen port in Jamnagar has seen this cheating evolving to a tradition now, subsidised fuel is sold at 10.30 Rs. per lt., however as per market cost the fuel is sold at around 60 Rs. per litre, fishermen had to shell out additional 50 Rs. Per litre. The black money circuit is amounted to 8-9 Lakh.
Rupen port has around 1500 boats, some says 200 out of these are only on paper, agencies says that counting of all boats is not possible (!!!) as there are no record of which boat left for sea and which is at bay. This makes things easy for cheaters to hide the non-existent boats.
News source: Sandesh
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