By KUMAR VIKRAM
PUBLISHED: 10:15 EST, 10 June 2016
Over the last two years, the Narendra Modi government has saved around Rs 10,000 crore of public money by deleting 1.62 crore bogus ration cards and streamlining the public distribution system.
Ram Vilas Paswan, minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution, said the grain leakage seen under the UPA regime was due to bogus ration cards, and corruption in the department.
Paswan said: “Now, this has stopped after 100 per cent digitisation of ration cards. During the process of digitisation, we found crores of bogus ration cards. There were many ration cards in the name of one person.
Digitisation of ration cards has been completed in all states, allowing the government to delete all duplicates
"Similarly, in some cases, there were ration cards with the names of people who do not even exist. We found total 1.62 crore such bogus ration cards which have been deleted now,” said the minister.
Digitisation of ration cards has been completed in all states.
The number of states and union territories with online food-grain allocations has increased to 25, from 5 in June 2014, and the online grievance portal has now been introduced across all states.
Aadhaar Identity Card
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is a central government agency of India, and its objective is to collect the biometric and demographic data of residents. This is then stored in a centralised database,
Each resident is then issued with a unique 12-digit identity number. Aadhaar is considered the world's largest national identification number project.
“So far, about 56 per cent of ration cards have been seeded with Aadhaar. This digitisation and the seeding with Aadhaar has helped check the leakage of food-grain and in doing so saved Rs 10,000 crore of public money,” said Paswan.
While most of the states have completed seeding ration cards with the Aadhaar cards, states like Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, UP and others are lagging behind.
Countering the claim, Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the UPA had also weeded out a large number of bogus ration cards and there is nothing great about it.
“Actually 66 lakh so-called fake deletions include those cards which are not fake but where the person has moved from the eligibility to beyond eligibility. So, that is not a fake card, even that is included in 66 lakhs. What is great about it? A press release in December 2015 said in 2012 to 2014, 1.2 crore ration cards were deleted by the UPA government.”
To check the leakage of food-grain from the FCI godowns, all operations of the go-downs have been brought to the online platform, claimed Paswan.
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