Ration Card holders of eight districts of the State wouldn’t have to face unfriendly gestures, unsatisfactory answers and unnecessary lingering for getting their monthly ration from PDS dealers.
Adding another feather in the cap of implementing e-governance across all its departments directly dealing with common people, the Government on Sunday launched e-PoS service in Public Distribution System (PDS) in the State. With this, Jharkhand has become only 3rd State in country to have their PDS system digitised.
launching the service, CM Raghubar Das called this electronic Point of Sale (e-PoS) a game changing move. “With the launch of this system, we are trying to reach out to the exact beneficiaries. Middlemen must consider themselves thrown out of the scene now onwards, as they will find no room at all to creep into this system or ditch the system. This will result in some Rs500 crore of savings of public money every month, which earlier used to go to the hands of middlemen who kept trespassing every single gate and window created to stop them,” said Raghubar Das on the occasion.
Apart from Ranchi where pilot project of the system before launch proved to be very successful, Hazaribagh, Chatra, Pakur, Jamtara, Garhwa, Saraikela and Khunti are the districts where e-PoS has been launched on Sunday in first phase.
The e-PoS system which ensures ration to be distributed only through biometric system with finger-print technique will be fully operational by October 2 in all the districts in phased manner. The system will be launched in 10 districts in 2nd phase followed by remaining six districts in final phase.
After successful launch across the State by then, it will have 23,315 locations, 58,40,000 families and 2,63,60,000 citizens will be under this umbrella with over 1 crore transactions every month.
Das further added that the vision of providing rice and wheat to families living below poverty line (BPl) was not a fresh thought, as it was a part of the manifesto of BJP in 2009-10 Assembly elections. “But government couldn’t last more than 4-5 months and we missed it that time. Now government is all serious to provide nutritious food to its last citizen. We are going to launch mobile Dal-Bhat vans in 10 districts from October 2, where poor could go and eat,” said Das. He also said that those dealers not distributing ration on time would be thrown out of the system immediately.
Food, Public Distribution, Consumer Affairs Saryu Roy, Chief Secretary Rajbala Verma, Secretary to CM and Information Technology and e-Governance Department Secretary Sunil Kumar Barnwal, Kanke MlA Dr Jitu Charan Ram, Ranchi DC Manoj Kumar and other officials were also present at the launch of the system.
Roy said, “Jharkhand is probably the only State in India which has launched this system which works even if there is a power failure. However, if there still any glitch exists at functional level later on, people must cooperate than making it an example of system failure. Middlemen must go out now, as there is no place for them.”
The Chief Secretary said on the occasion that the desired system to implement this system throughout the State needed to be strengthened. “The Government is very much open to recruit manpower suggested by the Department to make field formation as proper as plans like MGNREGA have in place to make implementations of those plans successful,” said Verma.