Snags hit devices in city ration shops, some recipients return empty-handed

Residents reported problems from stores in and around Vasant Vihar, Malviya Nagar, Okhla, Gandhi Nagar and parts of New Delhi, among others.

Several ration card holders returned empty-handed from fair price shops (FPS) in south and east Delhi on Monday, after glitches in the electronic point of sale (e-POS) devices in the stores. Officials in the food and civil supplies department said the complaints reported were mostly down to poor network coverage, even as reports seen by HT showed that the Delhi government managed to reach out 64.65% of the 1.77 million eligible beneficiaries in seven days since the launch of the ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’ programme in the city on July 20.

Senior officials from the food department, however, said there were no large-scale reports of such malfunctions. (File photo for representation)

Residents reported problems from stores in and around Vasant Vihar, Malviya Nagar, Okhla, Gandhi Nagar and parts of New Delhi, among others.

Ramesh, a daily wage worker who lives in New Delhi’s Kusumpur Pahadi and goes by a single name, said he even took his two sons to get their biometrics authenticated. “But, the machine was not able to read our fingerprints. I lost a day’s income (nearly ₹400) today to queue up at the ration shop, but returned empty handed,” he said.

Sanno Devi, a resident of South Delhi’s Jagdamba Camp, is a widow and disabled. Despite having a ration card on her, she was unable to get the subsidised food grains, due to problems with the e-POS machine.

Senior officials from the food department, however, said there were no large-scale reports of such malfunctions.

“It is true that teething issues are being faced in some circles, but it will be wrong to say that the system is not working in the entire city. Even if we see the latest data of Delhi’s public distribution system after the implementation of ONORC, it is one of the fastest disbursals the government has done in recent times,” said the official who asked not to be named.

Owners of FPSs have been asked to put up a board outside their shops informing people if machines are not working, to limit queues in such situations.

Between July 20 and July 26, government data showed, 1,150,511 (64.68%) beneficiaries of the total 1,778,527 ration card holders in Delhi received subsidised food grains under ONORC. Northwest zone was the best performing district, disbursing July’s ration quota to 215,756 card holders. This was followed by the northeast zone with 199,638 beneficiaries receiving ration. The New Delhi zone had not distributed ration to 51% of its beneficiaries till Monday evening, showed the data.

ONORC, introduced in 2019, aims to add digital muscle to the country’s public distribution system (PDS) through which food grains are offered at subsidised rates to about 739 million beneficiaries under the national food security law. ONORC allows a beneficiary, such as a migrant worker, to access her share of subsidised ration from anywhere in the country regardless of the place where her ration card is registered. In other words, it allows mobility of food entitlements.

In Delhi, people can get cheap grains from any of the 2,000 fair price shops. For this, the government has deployed 2,005 e-PoS devices across the capital to get ONORC going.

Anjali Bhardwaj, member of the Right to Food campaign which surveys FPSs in Delhi, on Monday said the government has made Aadhaar-based biometric authentication mandatory without offering an alternate process to fall back upon if the electronic system crashes. “As a result, people are at the mercy of these machines, most of which were not working on Monday in places where our teams inspected. Many ration card holders waited for hours, but did not get the subsidised food grains. The problem is that there is no back-up option to disburse ration if the e-POS or biometric authentication fails,” she said.