Fair price shops will go digital soon: Bapat

Explaining the digitisation drive, food and civil supplies Principal Secretary Mahesh Pathak said the drive would be implemented in three phases.

“In the first phase which will end on January 31, fair price shops in seven food districts will be digitised. In the second phase which will be concluded on February 17 more food districts will have finished digital linking of the FSP.

By the end of March, remaining 18 food districts too would have boarded the digital wagon. So from the new financial year, all the FPSs will only distribute the food grains using biometric-enabled POS systems,” Pathak said.

Bapat said that digitisation would help in live monitoring of the grain stock at FPS as well as state godowns and sale of grain by the shop owner which will go a long way in plugging the pilferage.

As part of this project, the government has computerised 54,930 FPSs, 60,049 kerosene sellers and 488 godowns which store the grains. He said the work to feed the information about the ration card was on and would be finished soon .

“There are as many as 7 crore beneficiaries of Food Security Act in Maharashtra. Of these, ration cards of as many as 6.25 crore beneficiaries have been linked with Aadhaar. After linking this with their contact numbers, we will send updates about the grain availability status as well as withdrawal of grains by the beneficiaries to their cell phones,” said Bapat.

Bapat said that due to Aadhaar linking of the ration cards, duplication of beneficiaries FSA beneficiaries was stopped. “This in turn helped us extend the FSA to 98 lakh new individuals which hold orange (APL) ration cards. These include 48 lakh rural beneficiaries and 44 lakh urban beneficiaries,” he said.