In a move to check black-marketing of PDS articles in the State, the Food and Civil Supplies Department has made GPS enabled vehicles mandatory for carrying those articles from this July.
Counting on the achievements made by the department during the last two years at Suchna Bhawan here on Thursday, Food and Civil Supplies Secretary Vinay Kumar Chaubey said that NACOF has been blacklisted for not adhering to the agreement signed with the State Food Corporation (SFC).
“The GPS tracking system has been made tamper proof for which the route for the vehicles carrying food grains from the destination has been fixed after physical verification made by the officials. As soon as these vehicles divert from their designated route, it could be identified over the centralized control system after which the driver or the owner of the vehicles will be asked to hold on and the officials will visit there to see the reasons for the route change by the driver,” said Chaubey. Bills of the vehicles carrying food grains will be cleared only if their GPS tracking system will match with the data base available with the department, he added.
Chaubey said that as many as 1600 vehicles have been equipped so far with GPS tracking system which would be increased as per the requirement in future.
Ration Card Management System will also be started from July 1 through which complaints related to ration cards like name correction, addition of name, removal of name or change of address could be taken up.
“Under Right to Service Act, the department will have the obligation to get them addressed within a period of 30 days,” he said.
Further counting the achievements, Chaubey pointed out that the department has also succeeded in completely computerizing the activities carried out by it.
“Around 88-90 per cent of the transactions in PDS shops are presently being done through Point of Sale (PoS) machines putting Jharkhand on the second position in digitization of PDS system in the country. With this, it becomes the second best state in adopting digitization in PDS in the country after Telangana, Chaubey said.
In addition to that, he said that at least 98 per cent of the Adhaar seeding of ration cards has been done while rest of the 2 per cent would be done by June 30.
Jharkhand, according to Chaubey, has also the credit of becoming the only State in the country where BPl families are provided free of cost gas stove and a refilled cylinder under Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana.
Chaubey also added that National Federation of Farmers’ Procurement, Processing and Retailing Cooperatives of India ltd (NACOF) has already been blacklisted for not paying farmers their dues against the procurement of paddy by the company.
