Assam has lastly operationalised the ration card portability service and with this, the Centre’s ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’ programme is applied throughout the nation, the meals ministry stated on Tuesday.
Under the ONORC (One Nation, One Ration Card), beneficiaries lined below the National Food Security Act, 2013 (NFSA) can get their quota of subsidised foodgrains from any digital level of sale system (ePoS)-enabled honest value outlets of their alternative through the use of their present ration playing cards with biometric authentication.
“Assam has become the 36th state/UT to implement ONORC,” the ministry stated in an announcement.
With this, the ONORC programme has been efficiently applied in all states and Union Territories, making meals safety moveable all through the nation, it stated.
The implementation of ONORC was initiated in August 2019.
According to the ministry, ration card portability has considerably contributed in guaranteeing subsidised foodgrains to NFSA beneficiaries, particularly migrant beneficiaries, over the last two years of COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 2019, about 71 crore moveable transactions have taken place delivering foodgrains equal to about Rs 40,000 crore in meals subsidy by portability.
At current, a month-to-month common of about 3 crore moveable transactions are being recorded, delivering the subsidised NFSA and free PMGKAY foodgrains with wherever flexibility to the beneficiaries, it stated.
During the COVID-19 interval from April 2020 until date, the ministry stated about 64 crore moveable transactions have been recorded, delivering foodgrains equal to about Rs 36,000 crore in meals subsidy by portability.
Out of those 64 crore moveable transactions, 27.8 crore had been recorded below the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), introduced in March 2020 for distribution of extra free foodgrains to NFSA beneficiaries to mitigate the Covid-induced hardships.
The authorities has additionally rolled out the ‘MERA RATION’ cell utility to take most benefit of the ONORC plan. The cell app is offering a number of helpful real-time info to the beneficiaries and is accessible in 13 languages. So far, the app has been downloaded greater than 20 lakh instances from Google Play Store.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”