Pune district is set to weed out bogus ration cards by linking it to Aadhaar cards. The deadline has been set — March — and the department is working out ways and means to complete the task before that.
The district has registered an Aadhaar coverage of over 70 per cent. The district supply office is getting ready to increase the Aadhaar percentage and follow it up with ration card linkage.
“With the Aadhaar percentage more in rural areas, we will be initiating the work of the linkage soon so that it can bring about better transparency and weed out bogus ration cards,” said district supply officer Jyoti Kadam on the linkage process.
The government had announced the linkage to weed out bogus beneficiaries and curb pilferage in the system. The linkage will enable a fool proof system, said the officials from the department. The department also plans to put up the basic data online once it is ready. The message has gone to all the fair price shops for the linkage.
While the district administration is struggling to get the linkage for DBTL — which agains has a March deadline — the administration has to battle it out to reach out to beneficiaries so that they enrol first for Aadhaar before linkage is done with the department.
The state government has readied forms which seek bank account number details, IFSC code of the bank and the Aadhaar number. The data once readied will have the department issuing the pending smart cards which will have detailed information about utilisation of the rationing quota, the member of the family and the quota of stock.
The state has 7.01 crore beneficiaries covered under the Food Security Programme and Pune district has nearly 18 lakh beneficiaries. Even as there have been regular drives, a large number of fake ration cards, mostly misused by rationing dealers during distribution, led to loss of crores of rupees for the state government.
While Pune district had earlier weeded out over 3 lakh bogus ration cards, officials are hopeful that the linkage will help maintain better accountability