SMART-PDS a technological driven initiative should be implemented in all States

March 2, 2023March 2, 2023 MTIMES

New Delhi: SMART-PDS is a technological driven initiative and the need of hour, all the States and Union Territories should make earnest efforts to implement SMART-PDS at the earliest, said Shri Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Textiles and Commerce & Industries while addressing Conference of Food Ministers of all States and UTs.

The Union Minister emphasised on a transparent and accountable system urging to reduce human intervention and promote automation in the existing processes. He said transparency should be of utmost importance for free supply chain of foodgrains under Public Distribution System.

Shri Goyal appreciated Andhra Pradesh Command Control and stated that Central Government along with State Government will work together for implementing in other states also. On the Storage front, the Union Minister stated that Food Corporation of India (FCI) is upgrading their godowns into 5 star rated Godown and State Governments can also upgrade their godowns. With regard to settlement of pending claims of State Governments, he told that it is being done on priority basis and would be settled immediately.

SMART-PDS is a system where smart ration cards are issued to beneficiaries of PDS, and ration card is given through fair price shops on production of the smart ration card by any member of the PDS beneficiary family.

The purpose of the SMART-PDS System is to implement fingerprint matching for authentication of the user, which in turn reduces corruption, misuses of cards and to reduce the time.

It is expected that seamless procurement with direct transfer of money into farmer’s account, minimum cost of transportation and human interference free and quick analysis of foodgrains shall be a part of the ecosystem of Food Security Management very soon.

The auto grain analyzer based on Artificial Intelligence is able to process results in a minute with high accuracy for paddy, rice, wheat, Pulses, oil seeds and coarse grain. It has been certified by ICAR- CIPHET, Ludhiana. It involves minimize human intervention/error/biasness and saves time by giving digitally verifiable result of each grain.

The other issues related to smart PDS and One Nation One Ration Card for seamless delivery of food grains to migrant beneficiaries were also discussed. The best practice of command control centre by Andhra Pradesh for real time data on Procurement, storage, Quality and distribution of foodgrains was also discussed for which all states have been urged to learn and adopt the methods to make their systems effective and efficient.

The conference also discussed the issue of account finalization by foodgrain procuring states so that all pending payments are cleared in a time bound manner.

Further, implementation of additional minimum threshold parameters for online procurement operations, i.e. integration of power Validation of milled rice quantity with electricity consumption and Tracking of vehicles used for transporting food grains were also deliberated upon for improving efficiency & transparency in procurement operations.

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