Sunil Jain: e-PDS, the beginning

RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS

Did you know that while India is supposed to have 6.52 crore families that are below the poverty line (BPL) according to the Planning Commission (according to Surjit Bhalla, of course, they'd be around half this!), the actual number of BPL cards issued is around 8 crore?

There's a similar difference in the number issued for those above the poverty line. This 23 per cent difference, of course, is just the obvious theft that takes place in the public distribution system (since rations are issued against these as well).

Imagine the siphoning off that takes place by not giving people their entitled PDS grain/kerosene/sugar, and there is enough evidence that this is pretty rampant.

While this is a lot of theft considering the Rs 28,000 crore spent on this each year, it's obvious that the PDS cannot be stopped considering just how many millions of poor people depend upon it.

While there was a pilot smart card project in Trivandrum two years ago""no rations could be sold without swiping the citizen's smart card on the reader""this didn't take off as it was both too expensive and infeasible without 24x7 power supply and good-quality internet connectivity for validating the cards.

Fortunately, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is doing some pilot projects that could solve this critical problem of poor delivery systems. The pilots in Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, and Ernakulum in Kerala consist of several interlinked modules.

The first module tries to tackle the issue of fake cards. Since BPL cards in the village are based on an easily available certificate from the sarpanch, what's being done is to get the Block Supply Officer to independently verify the BPL families, and then instructing the PDS shops not to supply to the non-verified cards.

The second module, a better one since it is less open to corruption as it doesn't involve inspectors (to verify the cards are correct), is purely systems-driven.

What's being done is to capture data of all foodgrain released from the Food Corporation of India godowns (525 owned by the FCI and 720 rented ones) to various state foodgrain corporations, and then matching this with the grain picked up by each ration shop (this information is to be uplinked once a month).

Unlike what's portrayed in various Amitabh Bachchan movies, the bad guy is not so much the local ration shop owner as it is the fact that the rations get purloined along the way""that is, they're issued in the name of the ration shop, but just a fraction is actually delivered to the ration shop owner, who, more often than not, does not even have the funds to buy all that is allotted to him.

Ration shop dealers will now be giving regular details of their opening stock, allocations, sales, and closing stock, and this will be automatically mapped on the overall computer system.

[What helps in this case is that the NIC is also involved in a massive management information system for the FCI and is currently computerising all its godowns, capturing data on inflows and outflows of FCI grain under various government schemes (around 15""20 at the moment!)""right now, the FCI's brass does not even know exactly how much grain there is in each godown.

Since the weight of grain being moved by rail from one godown will also be on the system and will be automatically matched with the weight received at another godown, for instance, the FCI will also be able to immediately know just where the transit losses are taking place, in which train, and so on.]

An obvious lacuna, of course, is the probability that there's a group of rings operating the siphoning off. Assume there are three ration shops""A, B, and C""and each has to be given 100 kg of wheat from the state food corporation.

So, when the grain leaves the food corporation's godown, its computer shows that 300 kg has been despatched equally to A, B, and C, and along the way 150 kg is removed. Now, if the ring is powerful or has the ration shops in its network, when A, B, and C give their data, they will also report that they received (and sold) 100 kg of grain each and not 50 kg.

Naturally, then, the NIC system will detect nothing""in which case, setting up a mechanism to monitor things from the citizen's end becomes critical, and hugely expensive I suppose.

At present, the NIC is not looking at this aspect""it feels the system is so complex with so many schemes that it will be difficult for anyone to run an operation of the type just described, to keep track of the grain issued to each ration shop under each of the 15""20 schemes run by the government and then ensure this matches up exactly when the ration shops give details of their operations.

What is possible even now, of course, is something the Assam government is working on""it collates details of the grain/kerosene/sugar made available to each ration shop, and this is available to citizens/panchayats through citizen information centres (CICs) scattered across the state.

While state government officials are candid enough to admit no one's asking for such information at the CICs as yet, once it is publicised that such information is easily available, it's a very powerful tool""a group of panchayats serviced by one ration shop, for instance, could then collect information from their villages and show they got just a fraction of the rations allocated in their name.

suniljain@business-standard.com