'System error' depriving poor of PDS ration: Dharamsala MLA

Lashing out at the Chief Minister Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu, the MLA of Dharamsala Assembly constituency and senior BJP leader Sudhir Sharma has said that the Sukhu government's "system error" is now taking a toll on the poor people of the hill state.

The poor people were facing difficulties in availing ration from the depots of public distribution system (PDS) due to poor mobile phone networks, system errors and mechanical errors.

He said the process of taking ration from the ration depots has changed as the consumers now have to identify themselves with the OTP (one time password) received on their mobile phone numbers instead of putting their thumb impression on the point of sale (POS) machines installed in all government fair price shops. This is being done because the validity of the Aadhaar authentication device (POS) being used in the PDS has expired its validity.

It may be mentioned that the Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department has written a letter to the Union Government demanding extension of the validity of these machines. If the extension was not received, the tender would be called to purchase new machines.

The biometric machines being used were of L-Zero category, which have been discontinued by the UIDAI. According to the new guidelines, now only L-One level machines will be valid for distribution of ration in the public distribution system. In such a situation, new machines will have to be installed by removing the old ones in all the depots, which will take time. There was a frequent problem in identifying the thumb with the old machines.

Taking a dig at the state government, Sudhir Sharma alleged that the government has blocked the ration cards of thousands of beneficiaries, due to which they were deprived of getting cheap ration from the fair price shops.

The MLA said that there were more than 5000 ration depots in the state with about 20-lakh ration card holders. In every depot, the cards of 50 to 100 beneficiaries had been blocked for the past six months by the Food and Civil Supplies Department without assigning any reasons, he alleged.