Ration network goes digital this week

Sale of ration articles across Kerala would go completely digital from this week with the Food and Civil Supplies Department deploying Electronic Point of Sale (ePoS) machines in all the 14,374 ration shops in the State.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan would formally declare the complete digitisation of the State’s ration distribution/supply chain, in compliance with the National Food Security Act (NFSA) at a function to be held at Kannur on Friday, Food and Civil Supplies Minister P. Thilothaman told a news conference here on Wednesday.

The Department of Civil Supplies completed the mammoth task of installation of ePoS machines across all retail ration outlets after connecting the 3.41 crore ration beneficiaries in the State with the Ration Card Management System utilising the Aadhaar database.

All 14,374 ration dealers and their staff were given training in managing the sales through ePoS machines on a single day at 348 centres in the State.

All 1,500 Civil Supplies Department staff also underwent elaborate training in the ration card management system.

Social audit

In order to ensure that the ration distribution system was smooth, the Civil Supplies Department had already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences for conducting social auditing of the system.

New ration cards will be distributed from June 1 to some 75,000 families who somehow got left behind and are currently not registered with any of the ration cards.

Once this process was completed, all ration card holders in the State would be linked to the ration card management system, ensuring total monitoring of the ration distribution system in the State, the Minister said.

As part of the PDS renovation, the government was also contemplating GPS tracking of vehicles transporting foodgrain in the distribution chain as well as installation of surveillance systems in all distribution centres.