Coimbatore: Within a few days of implementing the ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ scheme, the state government has stopped it temporarily after it was found to be time consuming. Officials from the Tamil Nadu public distribution system (TNPDS) have restored the previous method of distributing dry rations by swiping the smart card of beneficiaries.
Under the scheme, cardholders could buy their monthly entitlement of dry rations from any electronic point of sale (ePoS) enabled ration shops in the country. It should be bought only by a person whose name is included in the card. While rice is distributed free of cost, other products, including sugar and dal, are sold at subsidized price to the cardholders. People from other states could avail only two products – rice, which is priced at Rs 3 per kg, and wheat, which is priced at Rs 2 per kg.
The scheme was implemented on a pilot basis at 135 ration shops in the south taluk of Coimbatore on October 1 and two weeks later, TNPDS had decided to extend it to all the 1,419 ration shops in the district. The district has 10.37 lakh cardholders. Of them, 9.40 lakh are rice cardholders.
An official from the office of district supply officer (DSO) said, “The software is linked to the master database where Aadhaar card details of the cardholders are stored. Whenever a person collects ration products at the shop, he/she will have to give their fingerprint and it in turn should match with the fingerprint in the database. Only then ration products will be handed over to them.”
In the place of distributing ration products to about 150 people per day at a shop, we could attend only 40 people at the maximum and it takes us at least 30 minutes to deliver the products to a person, the official said. The delay in processing the information and matching the fingerprints in the master database is due to poor network and low server capacity.
“As we have been receiving a lot of complaints from the public, the state government has stopped it temporarily and have been taking steps, including upgrading the software, to reduce the time consumption,” the official said. The scheme is likely to resume within a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the TNPDS have restarted distributing the rations to the people just by swiping their cards at all the ration shops and it is to ensure that people are not affected during the festival season, he added.