nIn an initiative of 'one nation, one ration card', the Ministry of Food and Consumer Affairs has come up with a standard format for ration cards and has asked State Governments to follow the pattern while issuing fresh ration cards.

An official in  Ministry said  a standard format for ration card has been prepared after taking into account format used by different States and after consultation with other stakeholders. State Govts have been advised to use this new format whenever the States decide to issue new ration cards, the official added.

Currently, the Central Government's ambitious initiative is being implemented on a pilot basis in a cluster of six States. It wants to implement this facility across the country from June 1, 2020.

“In order to achieve aim of national portability, it is necessary that ration cards issued by different States and UT’s conform to a standard format. Accordingly, a format for standardised ration card has been prepared for issue of ration card under NFSA,” a senior Food Ministry official said.

 Elaborating more, the official said the standardised ration card includes the requisite minimum details of the ration card holder and States can add more details as per their requirement.

For national portability, the State Governments have been asked to issue the ration card in bi-lingual format, wherein besides the local langauge, the other language could be Hindi or English. 

The States have also been told to have a 10-digit standard ration card number, wherein first two digits will be State code and the next two digits will be running ration card numbers.

Besides this, a set of another 2 digits will be appended with ration card number to create unique member IDs for each member of household in a ration card, official added. Under  NFSA, about 75 crore beneficiaries have been covered so far against the target of 81.35 crore, as per official data.