C’garh deleted 12.38L bogus ration cards from list since 2013

Chhattisgarh Government has deleted a total of  12,38,000  bogus ration cards from its list since 2013 so far, the Central Government has informed.

The total number of ration cards seeded with Aadhaar stood at 52,99,000 out of  53,08,000 in the State, it informed.

In order to identify and weed out duplicate ration cards/ineligible beneficiaries from TPDS, and to enable rightful targeting of food subsidies, States/UTs have been asked to seed the available Aadhaar numbers of eligible beneficiaries in their ration cards/beneficiaries database.

At present 84.36% of total 23.18 crore ration cards under NFSA at the national level have been seeded with Aadhaar number of at least one member of the household. As per information received from States/UTs, a total of 2.75 crore ration cards have been reported as deleted/cancelled in 32 States/UTs since 2013.

Notably, the increased mobile penetration through Chhattisgarh Sanchar Kranti Yojna (CG-SKY) will help the state leverage it as spinoff for Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme, officials informed.

The DBT scheme will lead to better targetting of beneficiaries. Cutting out leakage will lead to savings that may even be enough to help recover the cost of CG-SKY scheme, they informed.

The state was earlier unable to make much headway in DBT because of its low mobile penetration, officials informed.

The poor connectivity is attributable largely to some unique realities in Chhattisgarh relating to poor affordability of the people and economic viability for the operators.