Ration card (India)
[1] Under the NFSA, all state governments in India have to identify households that are eligible for purchasing subsidised food grain from the Public Distribution System and provide them with ration cards.
It enables migrant workers and their family members to access PDS benefits from any Fair Price Shop anywhere in the country, thus ensuring the food security through the inter-state portability of ration cards.
Now, "Integrated Management of Public Distribution System" (IM-PDS) portal has been introduced, which will work in combination with Annavitran Portal to enable the inter-state portability of ration cards under which migrant worker can buy his/her share of food in their migrant destination location, and the rest of his/her family members can buy subsidised foodgrains from their FPS (Food Provision Store) back home.
PoS (Point of Sales) machines have been installed across all FPSs and in the country and Annavitran Portal has been seeded with Aadhaar.
[2] After the enactment of NFSA, all state governments developed a set of eligibility criteria to identify households for issuing ration cards.
[15][16] PDS shop owners in collusion with government officials diverted the subsidized food supply and petroleum to the black market.
Seeding helps identify genuine and eligible beneficiaries and prevents duplicate and non-existent persons from registering.
Due to lack of a unique identifier like Aadhaar, stand-alone databases cannot detect and eliminate duplicate or fraudulent beneficiaries.
In this way, Aadhaar saves billions of rupees of public money annually and enables poor people access to social security benefits.
[21][26] Tangible benefits became visible from 2014; a report by UBS published in January 2014 showed Aadhaar DBT can save 1.2% of GDP.
[27][28] With the help of e-Ration service, applicants can obtain ration cards and check their costs and food grain availability online.
This will help end the corrupt practice of holding back rations and ensure cards reach the needy.
Seeding ration cards with AADHAR ensured uniqueness of beneficiaries in Public Distribution System (PDS).
19,410 actions were taken against FPS licenses which were either suspended, cancelled, sent show-cause notices, or FIRs lodged by States/UTs, this included 13,905 in Uttar Pradesh, 3,139 in Kerala, etc.
[31][32] When a beneficiary buys rations from a PDS shop, their eligibility is authenticated through an Aadhaar KYC handheld device.
M-Ration Mitra is a smartphone application that allows people to register for Ration cards through mobile phones, which essentially fast tracks the whole process exponentially.
