Ration card portability now covers 24 states/UTs
03 Aug 2020
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Four more states/union territories joined the One Nation One Ration Card scheme on Saturday, taking the national portability of ration cards to 24 states. With this, about 80 per cent of total population covered by the National Food Security Act (NFSA) would be able to receive PDS food grains in any of these 24 states/UTs.
Reviewing the progress of `One Nation One Ration Card’ scheme, union minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution, Ram Vilas Paswan, acknowledged the requisite technical readiness of Jammu & Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland and Uttarakhand, which enabled the Department of Food & Public Distribution to integrate these four states/UT with existing 20 states/UTs for the National Portability.
As of now, a total of 24 states/UTs, including Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Telangana, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand are connected with the ration card portability scheme.
With this, about 650 million (80 per cent) of total NFSA population is now potentially enabled to receive food grains anywhere in these states/UTs through national portability of ration cards. The remaining states/UTs are expected to be integrated with national portability scheme by March 2021, the minister stated.
Under the ambitious `One Nation One Ration Card’ scheme, the DoFPD plans to ensure the delivery of food security entitlements to all beneficiaries covered under the National Food Security Act, 2013, irrespective of their physical location in the country. The nation-wide portability of ration cards is being implemented under the ongoing central sector scheme of ‘Integrated Management of Public Distribution System (IM-PDS)’ in association with all states/UTs.
Through this system, the migratory NFSA beneficiaries who frequently change their place of dwelling in search of temporary employments, etc are now enabled with an option of lifting their entitled quota of food grains from any fair price shop (FPS) of their choice anywhere in the country by using their existing ration card with biometric/Aadhaar based authentication on an electronic point of sale (ePoS) device installed at the FPS.
