The Financial Express
To create an integrated national level dashboard for monitoring of end-to-end operations of public distribution system (PDS) through usage of cutting edge technologies, the food ministry will launch scheme for modernisation of PDS — Smart PDS — the next fiscal year.
Through application of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, information communication technology (ICT) tools will be used as part of Smart PDS to monitor functions from procurement of grains from the farmers across states till the distribution to the 800 million beneficiaries under National Food Security Act (NFSA).
Food ministry officials said that by using data, analytics and ICT tools, the government aims to integrate all the operations relating to PDS of Food Corporation of India, Central Warehousing Corporation, food grain transportation of railways and roads and others.
“Through a national level common dashboard, we can monitor foodgrain movement at various levels from procurement from farmers to supplies through fair price shops (FPSs) on a real time basis,” Sanjeev Chopra, secretary, Department of Food and Public Distribution, told FE.
The food ministry has estimated the cost of Smart PDS scheme to be around `350 crore to be shared with states and will be implemented in three years — 2023-24 to 2025-26.
FCI and state agencies procure about 60-70 million tonne (MT) of rice and wheat annually under the Minimum Support Price (MSP) operations from farmers and distribute 5 kg of grain per month free to each of the NFSA beneficiaries.
The government’s food subsidy expenses are estimated at Rs 2 trillion in FY24.
Official sources said currently there are several challenges in the existing IT system of pds such as fragmented systems across states, lack of integration with other ministries, limited usage of data analytics and other cutting edge technologies in pds operations
Under the integrated management of scheme of pds, which would be concluded this fiscal, most of 193 million ration cards have been digitised and seeded with Aadhaar numbers while about 99% of 0.53 million ration shops have installed electronic – point of sale machines.
According to a food ministry note, there has been 86% computerisation of supply chain management of foodgrains.
Since the launch of the one nation one ration card scheme in Aug-2019 where migrant labourers have been allowed to get highly subsidised foodgrains under PDS from their locations of choice, more than 18 MT of foodgrains have been supplied.
For economic viability of FPSs)through generation of additional revenues, the department of food and public distribution in collaboration with the ministry of electronics and information technology has revamped 38,000 FPSs into common service centres (CSCs).
CSCs provides host of services such as registrations for Aadhaar and PAN cards, booking of train tickets, music downloads, checking of bank balance and accessing information relating to eligibility of various schemes.
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