Dr. Nitin. B. Jawale, IAS Collector Rayagada gave a presentation on the present position of the Biometric based TPDS project. Till now 84% of the about 2.40 lakh families have be enrolled and 16 % are left out for various reasons. There have been nine thousand cases of wrong classification of which more than half have been corrected and cards are ready for distribution. Once this task is completed, the district administration will go for enrollment of the left out families
It is pertinent to mention here that more than 22 thousand bogus and ghost cards were eliminated by the software deduplication process and the district makes saving of more than 3 crores per year by the check on pilferage of essential commodities made possible by this project.
After the review meeting the commission visited two fair price shops in Rayagada Municipality area, where smart card operated Point of Sale device (POS) are installed. All the transactions in these devices are uploaded to the MIS server.
In the second half the team visited two rural fair price shops, one in Kumtilpetta and the other in Penta GP head quarters. In rural areas, GPs are the Fair price shops and instead of smart card operated POS devices, the system here is of bar coded cards and bar coded coupons. The bar coded coupons once used are collected by the marketing inspectors and centrally scanned at the district head quarters. After scanning the transaction details are uploaded to the server.
The commission members also appraised the district administration about similar projects in other parts of the country, particularly Gujarat.
