Tripura has become the first state in the Northeast where ration card portability network has been operationalized.
The secretary of the Tripura Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department, Debashish Basu informed about this on Saturday.
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Tripura is the third state in the country after Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to introduce this system.
Basu was of the view that in 27 ration shops or FPS in mountainous, remote interior and bordering areas, the portability networks could not be introduced due to unavailability of telephonic connectivity.
“However, under the Public Distribution System, we are providing five commodities to the people manually or off-line system in these 27 FPSs out of the 1810 fair price shops in the State,” Basu said.
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There are 10,072 ration card holders comprising 46,185 people under 27 FPSs.
He said that to maintain the portability networks and to carry on PDS, in some of the FPSs, services of Jio, RailTel are being utilized as the networks of state owned BSNL are not available in those areas.
Another senior official of Tripura’s Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department said of the 27 ration shops, there are 10 FPSs covering 15,000 people located just along the India-Bangladesh borders.
BSNL official said that the Indian government is yet to decide on the improvement of telephone networks along the international border of the northeastern states due to security reasons.
Basu said that so far 15 states and union territories in the country have introduced the online ration card portability system.
By January, all states and union territories are expected to introduce the intra-state portability to form the first national grid for the ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’ scheme.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre is trying to rollout of the ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ scheme by June 2020, but several challenges remain to initiate the complete ration card portability across the country.