Irked consumers complain of errors in ration cards

Sumit Hakhoo

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Tribune News Service

Jammu, March 25

Although Jammu and Kashmir has started supplying ration as per the National Food Security Act, hundreds of consumers are not being provided ration as the new computerised ration cards issued to them by the Consumers Affairs and Public Distribution (CAPD) Department are full of inaccuracies.

The government, amid protests by people, started issuing the new ration cards during a massive campaign launched between 2014 and 2015 in the state to bring in reforms in the public distribution system.

The ration cards have added security features and classify people on the basis of their income, but consumers have been complaining of errors and discrepancies in them.

The common errors reported by consumers are incorrect names, non-factual details in the income data, clubbing lower income group people in the executive group and classifying children in the adult category.

The state government had undertaken a massive project to implement the Food Act. In each district, a committee was formed to prepare updated lists of ration card holders.

“The age of my grandchildren has been shown as 16 and 10 years in the ration card while their actual age is three and eight years. This has happened even when we had submitted the correct details,” said Chanchal Devi, a resident of the Gandhi Nagar area of Jammu.

A number of consumers who contacted The Tribune said they had been running from pillar to post but nobody in the administration was helping them in correcting the details on their ration cards.

“My ration dealer asked me to contact the naib tehsildar’s office for getting my father’s name corrected in the ration card but my problem was not solved. The office in turn told me to again approach the ration dealer with a new form. The new computerised ration cards are of no use,” said Mohinder Dutta, another irked consumer.

Officials of the Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution Department refused to comment on the discrepancies in the ration cards.

A senior bureaucrat, however, confirmed that errors had crept into ration cards at the data entry level and some of the information had been misinterpreted by operators while feeding the data.

“We have received information about wrong details in ration cards and efforts are being made to simplify the correction procedure so that people do not have to suffer. We are overburdened since the National Food Security Act was implemented in J&K and that is why there is confusion,” claimed the official.

The failure of the successive governments since 2011 to complete the consumer reverification process and issue tamper-proof ration cards had led to delay in release of additional quota of ration in the last three years.

The Central government had told the previous PDP-BJP coalition government that no additional ration would be released till irregularities in the public distribution system were removed and updated data of consumers verified properly.

Tehsildar, Bahu tehsil, Jammu, Muzaffar Ali Malik said they had also seen the mistakes. “We have asked people to submit new forms with correct details. It is a problem in every district. It is not our fault but of those who uploaded the data,” Malik said.

Jammu and Kashmir gets ration as per the 2001 Census. About 3 lakh families are not covered under it, leading to frequent protests by people, particularly in rural and mountainous districts of the state.