June 30, 2017

 Till now about 18 crore ration cards have been seeded with Aadhaar Numbers.

Centre’s push to Aadhaar seeding of ration cards & installation of electronic Point of Sale machines (e-POS) at the ration shops has helped Haryana to stop at least 30% pilferage of highly subsidized food grains for poor.

State govt. officials said this could help save about ₹500 crore annually.

All the 9,600 ration shops in Haryana have got the e-PoS machine & the Aadhaar coverage is about 105%.

It has also become the 1st state where a beneficiary can pick up the grain from any ration shop across Haryana irrespective of his place of residence.

“Around 42,00,000 beneficiaries under the food security law out of 1.35 crore didn’t pick up subsidized grains in the past couple of months due to transparent process of distribution. We deleted about 16,00,000 beneficiaries after detecting that many of the Aadhaar numbers were getting repeated in the beneficiary list,” said a Haryana govt. official.

“Now we’ve also made it a rule that there’ll be no carry over of the food-grains for the next month in case a beneficiary doesn’t pick up his allocation in that particular month; this is aimed at putting more pressure on them to submit their Aadhaar number at ration shops,” the official said.

Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan said that Aadhaar seeding & installation of e-PoS machines at ration shops have yielded great results.”In manual system there was no mechanism to find if the ration shop owner actually distributed food-grains to the beneficiaries. Now it isn’t possible to fudge any figure since the details are captured electronically.

We’ve asked states to fast track installation of e-PoS devices at ration shops & to go for 100% Aadhaar seeding,” he added.

 

Source - PTI