Project aims to ensure subsidized commodities reach intended beneficiaries, make supply system transparent, say officials
Moulishree Srivastava
The public distribution system is beset by two problems—duplicate accounts and ghost accounts. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint
Mumbai: The Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) government is putting in place an Aadhaar-based online platform that will track transactions under the public delivery system (PDS) across the country in real time. The information technology (IT) ministry is in talks with the food and public distribution ministry to implement the the project, aimed at making the system more transparent and ensuring that it reaches intended beneficiaries, a government official said.
PDS, under which the government distributes subsidized foodgrain meant for poor households, is beset by two common problems, according to R.S. Sharma, secretary, department of electronics and information technology (DEITY).
“First is duplicate accounts and the other is ghost accounts, where the beneficiary doesn’t exist,” Sharma said in an interview. “We will use Aadhaar card to address these issues, that is, to identify the individuals and validate the uniqueness of the identities. And we will track these in real time.
” Sharma, who helped build Aadhaar, under which every resident in India is to be provided a unique identity number, put in place a pilot project tracking PDS transactions in Jharkhand, where he served as chief secretary before moving to DEITY in May. He now plans to scale up the project across India.
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka also have online systems to track PDS. The pilot project in Jharkhand covers 24.7 million families and 476,000 unique Aadhaar number holders.
As per the latest government data, there are 700 million Aadhaar card holders in the country. Designed and developed by the National Informatics Centre, Jharkhand, the portal can show day-wise, date-wise and month-wise PDS transactions, summary reports of transactions, the list and details of cardholders.
“It also reflects the transactions as they happen, so anybody can see where and when the transactions are happening,” he said. “The idea is to link all the ration cards to Aadhaar card holders in a family. The ration card number, along with Aadhaar card and fingerprint, can be used to check the entitlement,” he said. “In case of a duplicate account, we can cancel the entitlement.” “This model has proved worthwhile in Jharkhand as well as in Andhra Pradesh. We want to expand this platform across the country since we already have software and hardware for front end as well as back end in place,” said Sharma.
Sharma explained that “seeding is not going to be a problem” in this case. “The retailers (registered dealers) will have a mobile device, from which they can feed the Aadhaar card number for a ration card holder into the system.” The database, hosted in the IT ministry’s central data center in New Delhi, can thus be upgraded in the process. “PDS is a state subject and the states’ pace will decide the pace of roll-out for this programme.
However, if the solution is driven based on a cloud-hosted approach by DEITY, then it would be easier for the progressive states to adopt the solution faster,” said Jaijit Bhattacharya, partner, infrastructure and government services practice, at KPMG India.
“The solution has indeed been a very successful implementation in Jharkhand. However, as we are all aware, local issues and addressing those issues will also be crucial for ensuring successful replication and implementation across the country,” he said.
The department of food and public distribution is “in the process of getting the states on-board”. “We are all for digital India and transparency. We are pushing for this (platform). We have already taken this up with the states and are continuously in discussion with them,” said Sudhir Kumar, secretary, department of food and public distribution. “Though the talks are in different stages with different states, ultimately, the states are the ones who could push it. It might take some time due to vested interests which get benefited from the leakages since they keep trying to disrupt it.”
The proposed project follows a trial biometric attendance system that the IT ministry put in place a month ago through the website www.attendance.gov.in, which shows real-time attendance details of nearly 50,000 employees across 148 organizations. Last week, the ministry said it would link mobile SIMs with Aadhaar numbers to deal with the misuse of technology for wrongdoings such as diversion of subsidies, financial misdemeanours and terrorism. The centre proposes to extend a system similar to its biometric attendance system to primary healthcare centres and the mid-day meal scheme to ensure doctors are on duty and the food reaches children who are actually attending school, said Sharma.