13854 - 23k ‘inactive’ BPL cardholders to be removed from list -TNN

23k ‘inactive’ BPL cardholders to be removed from list 

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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/65328402.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

10640 - Aadhaar for PDS: HC orders notice to government

Aadhaar for PDS: HC orders notice to government

Bengaluru: Nov 25, 2016, DHNS

The Karnataka High Court on Thursday ordered issuance of notice to the state government in a public interest litigation (PIL) challenging the Aadhaar-based biometric coupon system for below poverty line (BPL) card holders.

The petitioners, Rajeshwari and nine others from Bedarakeri village and other parts of Shivamogga district, contended that the system is causing inconvenience to certain category of BPL card holders.

A division bench of Chief Justice Subhro Kamal Mukherjee and Justice R B Budihal issued notices to the Secretary Department of Food and Civil Supplies, Deputy Commissioner of Shivamogga district and Deputy Director of Food and Civil Supplies. The matter was adjourned to two weeks. 

The petitioners claimed that the centres authorised by the department have been collecting Rs 30 per person for biometric coupons, whereas they are supposed to provide it free of cost. Besides, fair price shops and centres which distribute foodgrain and kerosene, have been providing them on unit basis. This means, foodgrains and kerosene are allotted per person according to the entry in the BPL card. 

The petitioners claimed that this rule has resulted in a lot of hardship and agony for certain BPL card holders. The petitioners have sought for quashing of the July 21, 2016 order of the state government making Aadhaar-based biometric coupon system mandatory for BPL card holders.

DH News Service

10552 - Shocking misuse of Aadhaar cards - Deccan Herald

Shocking misuse of Aadhaar cards

Oct 21, 2016, DHNS

Alarm bells must have started ringing in the Prime Minister’s Office as well as the food and civil supplies ministries of various state governments after the Civil Supplies Department of Karnataka unearthed last week a racket linking fictitious Aadhaar numbers to generate thousands of bogus BPL cards. 

The scandal came to light when senior department officials raided fair price shops in Bengaluru. It was found that invalid 12-digit numbers were linked with bogus ration cards while in other specific cases, single Aadhaar numbers were seeded with multiple fake cards. Random checking in Bengaluru alone has so far revealed 45,000 bogus cards belonging to about 300 ration shops, and similar reports have trickled in from other parts of Karnataka like Mysuru, Hubballi, Dharwad and Tumakuru. 

The Karnataka government has begun filing criminal cases in what appears to be only a tip of the iceberg. It should be a matter of enormous concern to the Centre because the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has identified Aadhaar as the single most effective tool to deliver food grains, fertilizers, kerosene and LPG subsidies to target beneficiaries with minimum leakage. About 60% of all ration cards across the country have already been linked to Aadhaar and the Centre had claimed recently that the government had made a saving of Rs 13,000 crore after detection of 2.16 crore bogus cards. A confidential study made by the PMO had revealed that out of Rs 2.11 lakh crore spent on various subsidies, there could be a net saving of Rs 33,000 crore by way of plugging leakages.

While other states will hopefully take a cue from Karnataka and conduct their own investigation on possible misuse of Aadhaar numbers, reports from across the country suggest that efforts to eliminate or minimise the gross plundering of PDS are far from a success. Lakhs of fake ration cards have been reported from Jammu & Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh. Chhattisgarh was touted as a ‘model state’ until recently as it was the first to fully implement Aadhaar-based biometric authentication. It involved installing point of sale machines at every ration shop for verifying the identity of cardholders by matching their finger-prints against Aadhaar database. But, last month, the anti-corruption bureau of the state conducted raids in several places and seized cash and documents showing coded diary entries of payoffs to officials and politicians. The Congress has accused the Raman Singh government of indulging in a multi-crore scam, but the chief minister has denied it. The Centre itself should get involved in the investigation of misuse of Aadhaar cards, as its stakes are pretty high, with the Supreme Court yet to give its consent to make it a mandatory document.

10135 - Get your APL card online by just feeding Aadhaar number - Deccan herald

Get your APL card online by just feeding Aadhaar number

The Karnataka government will soon roll out an online system for issuing ration cards for Above Poverty Line (APL) families.

Disclosing this to the media, Food and Civil Supplies Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao said citizens will be able to generate their own ration cards after filling an online form. Only Aadhaar number has to be disclosed and there is no need for any other documents under the new system, he added.

The department is still working on the new system, and it will in, all probability, be introduced in a month’s time. Currently, the department is supplying five kg rice and wheat each at a subsidised rate to the APL card holders every month.

On a proposal to supply tur dal and urad dal at Rs 120 per kg to people, the minister said the Centre has not allocated sufficient quantity of these pulses to the state.

The state has been given 1,000 metric tonnes.

“An estimated 10,500 metric tonnes is required per month to supply one kg of tur and urad dal per ration card under the public distribution system (PDS). We will take up the offer if the Centre allocates at least 5,000 metric tonnes per month,” he added.

The Centre recently offered to supply unmilled tur and urad dal to the state at Rs 66 and Rs 82 per kg respectively and asked to ensure availability of the pulses to people at not more than Rs 120 per kg. The Centre made this offer with an aim to give some relief to people from rising prices of pulses.

The state has to bear the cost of processing (milling), packing and transportation and distribute to consumers at Rs 120 per kg.

Rao said he will soon meet Union Food and Civil Supplies Minister Ramvilas Paswan and urge him to increase the allocation to the state.
  

9400 - Economic Survey highlights challenges to Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile, BAPU may be a solution - First Post

Economic Survey highlights challenges to Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile, BAPU may be a solution

by Seetha  Feb 27, 2016 15:34 IST

For some pre-1991 generations, the memory will still be stark. Everyone – even Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani - needed a ration card. While for many middle class people and the poor, queuing up for rations at the fair price shop was par for the course, many well-off people did not (the ration cards were merely compulsory identity and address proofs).

They would let their servants/ drivers use their ration cards to buy their rations. Many did not even do that, so fair price shop owners would show these card holders as having lifted their monthly rations and divert the rice and wheat to the black market.

Then came the targeted public distribution system and the categorisation of above poverty line (APL) and below poverty line (BPL) and that saw many people giving up their ration cards. In the debate on food subsidy, this misuse of ration cards has often been cited to argue against the universal provision of subsidised food grains (which food activists press for) and for targeted subsidy.

The loophole in the earlier system was that it allowed anyone to use a person’s ration card. The Economic Survey 2015-16 has strongly pitched for a system being implemented in quite a few states (in some on an experimental basis) – making it mandatory for card holders to physically go to ration shops and authenticate their identity through biometrics-based point of sale (POS) machines. Andhra Pradesh has been very successful in this. Madhya Pradesh has been trying several pilots and the Rajasthan government has been pushing for this aggressively.

The Economic Survey calls this BAPU (biometrically authenticated physical uptake). If X is not interested in picking up subsidised food grains and is allowing his card to be used by someone else, he will hardly be willing to do so if it involves him making a trip to the ration shop, proving his identity, taking the supplies and then giving it to someone else. 

In the earlier system, there was no cost involved; BAPU will involve costs, making diversion less attractive. The Survey pitches for BAPU for delivering food and kerosene subsidy and partly for fertiliser subsidy.

Incidentally, the union food and public distribution ministry is already pushing POS in a big way, incentivising state governments to shift to this, given the many problems in rolling out direct benefit transfer (DBT). Figures put out by the ministry in January show that over 61,000 fair price shops have installed POS machines; it planned to increase this number to 2 lakh by March end.

Some of these problems have been frankly acknowledged in the Survey and, apart from economic growth, it also strikes a sober note on the JAM trilogy (an acronym coined in last year’s Economic Survey), which has been touted as the silver bullet for addressing the problem of subsidies and leakages.

This year’s Survey admits that JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhar and mobile) may have made significant progress but still faces significant challenges. It elaborates on first-mile, middle-mile and last-mile issues that will need to be addressed if the successful DBT experiment in cooking gas is to be replicated in other areas.

In all the discourse about DBT and JAM until now, the focus was almost entirely on Aadhaar – the biometric identification of beneficiaries/ individuals. But Aadhaar is only an identity authenticating system; it is not an eligibility authenticating system. So, it will prove that a person availing of a subsidised good or service is that person; it cannot validate if that person is entitled to that subsidy. So it does not address the problem of, say, the well-off cornering Rs 5,500 crore worth of kerosene subsidies, as the Survey has pointed out.

Fortunately, the Survey acknowledges beneficiary eligibility and identification as a first mile challenge. It points to the need for beneficiary databases and the fact that the “accuracy and legitimacy of beneficiary databases have been hampered by the administrative and political discretion involved in grating identity proofs”. Indeed, the reason why the rollout of the National Food Security Act was extremely delayed was the fact that many state governments were reluctant to clean up and digitise their beneficiary databases.

The middle-mile challenge relates to coordination within the government – the lesser number of departments involved in administering a particular subsidy, the easier it is to roll out DBT. In the case of domestic fuel, for example, DBT was easier in the case of LPG because only the union petroleum ministry and the oil marketing companies (and their distributor networks) are involved. In the case of food and kerosene subsidy, the shift to DBT is complicated by the role of the central government, Food Corporation of India (in the case of food) and oil marketing companies (in the case of kerosene), state civil supplies departments (which administer the fair price shops/ kerosene depots).

The last-mile challenge is a significant one, which both supporters and critics of DBT have often flagged – the problem of banking infrastructure in rural areas and the failure of the banking correspondent model to take off. The Survey admits that “despite Jan Dhan Yojana’s record breaking feats, basic savings account penetration in most states is still relatively low” (46 per cent on average) and that mobile payments has not quite taken off in the rural areas.

In two graphs on JAM preparedness index, the Survey shows that only six states and an urban preparedness index of above 60 per cent (Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Haryana). In the case of the rural preparedness index, the performance of all states was abysmal – only Andhra Pradesh and Haryana notched more than 4 percent followed by Karnataka with 3.5 percent. But the BAPU preparedness index shows an interesting picture. Even states which did not do well on the urban and rural JAM preparedness index performed better on this score.

Obviously, then, BAPU could be a better option. Even though the union food and public distribution ministry has notified the Cash Transfer of Food Subsidy Rules 2015 under the NFSA, enabling states to switch to cash transfers if they want, there is a provision for shifting to DBT. The food ministry has initiated pilot projects on this. However, realising the problems involved, it is not pushing states too aggressively on shifting to DBT. It has given them the choice of opting for DBT or reducing leakage and diversion through POS.

The shift to BAPU will not be easy. Fair price shop owners stand to lose out from the reduced avenues for diversion and strongly resist this system. Rajasthan had to face a strike in 2014. State governments have to provide adequate incentives which allow shop owners to make up for the loss in revenue from diversion. Rajasthan tried this by branding ration shops as Annapurna Bhandars, in collaboration with Future Retail, allowing them to sell identified non-PDS items.

Aadhaar will still be important – that will validate the beneficiary’s identity. Sadly, the Survey did not flag the issue of the lack of legal status for Aadhaar (a major concern with both supporters and detractors on grounds of privacy) and pitch for early passage of a law on this.

But if the government is serious about reforming the subsidy regime, it must read the relevant chapter in the Economic Survey closely and act on it.

6061 - Department distributes new BPL, APL cards - The Hindu

MYSURU, November 23, 2014

Department distributes new BPL, APL cards

H. S. NARASIMHA KUMAR

The department got over seven lakh BPL and APL cards printed at the Government Press in Bengaluru . photo: M.A. SRIRAM

The Food and Civil Supplies Department has started distributing new cards to BPL and APL beneficiaries. The department recently got over seven lakh BPL and APL cards printed at the Government Press in Bengaluru.

K. Rameshwarappa, Senior Deputy Director of Food and Civil Supplies Department, told The Hindu that there were over 7, 30,000 card holders in Mysuru district, of whom over 60,000 beneficiaries have not furnished their EPIC card number and Aadhaar card number, without which new cards could not be issued.

They have been identified and are being persuaded by the department to furnish details. ome of them may have bogus cards and hence they are unable to furnish the details of their epic and Aadhaar cards, he said

Mr. Rameshwarappa said that cards were being distributed in taluk offices and gram panchayats. He appealed to the beneficiaries to surrender their old cards and get new cards which will be valid hereafter for availing various benefits.

He further said special offices have been set up in three zones in Mysuru city to provide information on ration cards and to distribute the new ration cards. The three zones are in Nazarabad, Vidyavardaka Law College and in Jayanagar. 

Similarly the department had taken a drive to inform residents in rural areas about the new cards being given. Mr. Rameshwarappa said that except for those who failed to submit EPIC numbers and Aadhaar card numbers, all other beneficiaries would being given food grains without interruption. He asked cardholders from rural areas to approach the gram panchayat office in their jurisdiction to upload information about their EPIC and Aadhaar cards to avail themselves of benefits.