In an incident that sharpens the irony of food grains rotting in FCI godowns while millions of people starve, a poor, old woman in Bihar was assaulted for picking up a few grains of wheat scattered around the wheels of a goods train at a railway station on Thursday.
When sacks of wheat were being unloaded from the train at the Sarai railway station in Vaishali district before being carried to the goods sheds, the frail, old woman, yet to be identified by name, was found picking up fistfuls of wheat lying near the train’s wheels. The impoverished woman, aged about 75, sat on the platform and leaned forward to pick up the wheat on the ground with an unsteady hand. She was putting the wheat into a small carry-bag she held in her other hand.
People identified as FCI contractors engaged in the transportation of the wheat stopped the woman from carrying on and snatched the wheat she had collected. She was badly roughed up at the railway station and then dragged to a room at the railway station, where she was kept confined for over an hour. When journalists questioned officials of the railways and the FCI at Sarai station about the woman’s confinement, one godown in-charge, Arun Kumar, and his colleagues rudely asked the journalists to leave and threatened to damage the video cameras of journalists.