Vijayawada: The cashless transactions have hit the ration dealers a lot in Krishna district. The dealers had distributed ration to the consumers on rupay cards by taking the assistance of e-Pos machines. However, the non-functioning of e-Pos machines has disappointed thousands of ration card holders and they are going back home without taking ration. In these two days, only 45,000 ration card-holders utili-sed the e-Pos service, according to district civil supplies authorities. Following the demonetisation of big currency, the state government has declared that this month’s ration will be given on credit basis to the end consumers, for the free flow of distribution.
However, the ration dealers have purchased the essential commodities on payment and distributed to the end consumers on credit basis. Following the failure of e-Pos machines at several places in the district, heavy rush of ration card-holders and confusion over the availability of funds in their respective bank accounts led to chaos at hundreds of ration shops across the district on Thursday and Friday.
While the district has a total of 11,80,000 ration cards, so far around 45,000 card-holders were able to get ration in these two days, following the failure of e-Pos machines. Out of these 45,000 card-holders, around 15 per cent people have taken the ration on credit basis. The civil supplies officials also did not give clarity to the ration dealers over credit bills. “We were told to distribute ration through cashless transactions, and the officials didn’t utter a single word about ‘credit bills’,” a ration shop dealer in the city told this correspondent.
The ration dealers have faced lot of problems in addressing this issue, as they were not informed of the credit bill till Thursday evening. Following the introduction of portability system, apart from e-Pos machi-nes, ration dealers are facing another problem. If a consumer takes ration on ration at one shop, the same person may not come to the shop next time, which will become difficult for the dealer to collect the credit from the consumer for which the civil supplies department has no readymade answer.
