Take the Food Security Act, which was the brainchild of the erstwhile UPA government. As reported in an article in Firstpost, of the 17.91 crore rural households covered, around 75% of these would be considered deprived and eligible for subsidized food supplies. This puts the figure at somewhere around 13.4 crore households. However, the census data puts this number at 8.69 crore households. This means that the UPA has simply overstated the number and the government would have ended up just throwing money where it was not required.
