Impact of ICT reforms on public distribution system in Andhra Pradesh – A review

The Public Distribution System (PDS) plays a significant role in the Indian government’s poverty alleviation programmes and discharging its social development obligations by providing food grains and essential items to the rural and urban poor at subsidized rates. While the social objective is of protecting poor citizens from the vagaries of market forces, the PDS current system has several well documented problems such as lack of transparency, accountability, poor governance and poor service delivery mechanisms. An important problem is the inaccurate identification of beneficiary households, which has resulted in eligible households being excluded (exclusion errors) and some ineligible households being included (inclusion errors) in the system. Another major shortcoming of the PDS is that beneficiaries often do not receive their full entitlement. This can happen either due to the diversion of grains by FPS owners to the open market or the non-availability of food grains. Because of these problems the real benefits is not reaching to the beneficiaries. The Public Distribution System in Andhra Pradesh started in 1974. Andhra Pradesh State has undertaken various PDS reforms from time to time to make its implementation more effective. In recent years, the central government, with the help of several state governments, has embarked on an ambitious initiative towards the end-to-end digital transformation of the PDS to address these problems. A key component of this initiative is the digitization of the beneficiary database and linking ration cards to Aadhaar numbers, referred to as ‘Aadhaar seeding’. This process intends to root out duplicate cards in the system and also prevent the creation of new ones in the future. Another key component, complementary to Aadhaar seeding, is the use of point of sale (POS) devices at FPSs. These devices help to reduce the diversion of grains by enabling authentication of beneficiaries through linkage to Aadhaar and biometric details, accurate recording of the quantity of grains sold to beneficiaries through the integrated weighing machine, and uploading of transaction data to the central server. To improve the efficiency of PDS introduction of Information Technology in the PDS is identified as the best practice. The present paper seeks to examine the objectives of Aadhaar Enabled Public Distribution System (AePDS) and this study also aims at the impact of ICT reforms increases the transparency of the commodities delivery process in PDS system. In this back drop, this paper finally studies the problems relating to the implementation of PDS and challenges of Aadhaar Enabled Public Distribution System (AePDS). Therefore, the purpose of this study reveals technology driven PDS will bring in transparency.