With as many as 69 lakh individuals applying over and above the target set by the Union Government to be included in the list of PDS beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in Odisha, the State Government has assigned 26 senior officials as Nodal Officers to ensure a clean beneficiary database at the district level.
The IAS officers who have been assigned various districts will visit the respective districts and even visit some wards and gram panchayts to scrutinise the process of verification of the list.
Chief Secretary GC Pati on Tuesday chaired a meeting of these Nodal Officers, where they were briefed in details by Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Secretary Madhu Sudan Padhi.
Padhi said the process of identification of PDS beneficiaries under the NFSA has reached the final stage and 105 lakh households comprising 395 lakh individuals have applied for new ration cards under the ACT.
However, the Government of India has set a ceiling of 326 lakh individuals to be covered under the NFSA as eligible (Priority and AAY Households) beneficiaries.
Thus, there is an excess of 69 lakh individuals, and there is a need to weed out the ineligible beneficiaries so that the total number of beneficiaries remains within the ceiling.
Padhi revealed that the Department of Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare (DoFSCW) conducted a de-duplication of applicant database and identified 12.65 lakh individuals to have been enrolled as Duplicate on the basis of same name strings and same Aadhaar Number.
Secondly, the Socio Economic Caste census (SECC) data received from the Union Government’s Department of Panchyati Raj has been superimposed on the NFSA applicant database.
This process has deleted 4.24 households consisting 16.2 lakh individuals to have applied despite being covered under one of the exclusion criteria of the NFSA as per their self-declaration during the SECC Survey in 2012.
Simultaneously, with the help of the IBM Master Data Management (MDM) tool database of exclusion criteria, Government servants, income tax payers, vehicle owners and pensioners are being linked to the applicant database and further ineligible families would be identified.
These are three suspect lists, which are being verified by Block Development Officers and Executive Officers for confirmation purpose, said Padhi.
It has been found that some applicants have not provided any vital information like father’s name or spouse’s name in the application forms submitted by them.
It has created doubt about the genuineness of such applicants. There are about 23.71 lakh applicants who fall in this category, and all of them have been kept in “On Hold”.