August date for digitised ration cards

Each card will have a separate barcode,thus helping the government retain a complete record of the card-holder. The card will store information such as photo and fingerprints of the head of the family.

Principal Secretary,food and civil supplies,BP Pandey said digitisation of ration cards will curb the use of bogus ration cards. “There have been cases of people procuring more than one ration card,” he said.

The digitisation will be a public-private partnership with Spanco Telesystems. A meeting on May 12 will discuss the pilot run of the project in the state. Earlier,the project — scheduled by December — had run into bureaucratic delays following the change of guard in the state Cabinet.

The company has already collated the required information and the pilot will be run in some parts of Pune and Mumbai. “It is necessary to run it first in some tehsils and then slowly move on to big cities and then the entire state. We will have the pilot run for three months,” Pandey said.

Ravi Bhatnagar,vice-president of Spanco Telesystems,said it was up to the state government to give the green signal. “Once we have the go-ahead from the government,we can start operations from any of the food and civil supply offices; we also plan to have a nodal office in Mumbai,” said Bhatnagar.

The company has invested Rs 40 crore in getting the system in place. “The rationing system in the state will undergo a sea change with these digitised,bar-coded,laminated ration cards. The work includes data entry for the digitisation of the existing 180 million beneficiaries in the state,” he said. The company has deputed over 1,000 people to complete the field project and an additional 1,500 hands for data entry and digitisation.

The ration cards will come at a cost (see box).

Tamil Nadu,Andhra Pradesh,Orissa and Chhattisgarh have already implemented the system.