Bhubaneswar: More than 1.77 lakh ghost ration card holders have been identified and removed from the Public Distribution System (PDS) database, Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Minister Krushna Chandra Patra told the Assembly today.
While replying to a question by MLA Manas Kumar Dutta, Shri Patra said the government conducted Aadhaar-based e-KYC updation for 2024-25 to bring transparency to the ration card database under the NFSA and State food security scheme.
Of 3,36,35,918 PDS beneficiaries in the state, the e-KYC verification process has been completed for 2,69,23,830. Names of beneficiaries, who have died, are being removed from the database, he said.
New and eligible beneficiaries will be added and subsequently new ration cards will be issued to them to ensure food security for all deserving families, he stated.
So far, a total of 619,836 beneficiaries have applied for new ration cards in the State.
In another written reply to a query of Congress MLA Sofia Firdous, Shri Patra said no false ration card has been detected in Odisha since June 15 2024.
However, 1,77,068 numbers of death cases have been detected in the PDS database since June 15, which have been deleted creating vacancy in the database, he said.
Giving the district-wise deletion of death cases, Shri Patra said highest 24,579 death cases were deleted in Ganjam district while 14,436 such beneficiaries have been removed from the list in Balasore district, 12,990 cases in Bhadrak district, 12,139 cases in Cuttack and 11,736 cases in Kendrapara district.
The vacancy has been filled up by inclusion of 1,77,068 left-out migrant labourers/workers in the eShram portal in pursuance of the directions of Supreme Court of India, he said.
He further said that the vacancy created further will be accommodated with inclusion of left-out eligible applicants soon, which is a continuous process.
The state government has been providing free rice to a total of 3.26 crore people from 93.23 lakh families under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) and 10.03 lakh people from 3.15 lakh families under State Food Security Scheme (SFSS).
The Centre is providing 22.44 lakh metric tonnes of rice to Odisha to meet the requirement under NFSA, whose cost would be around Rs 8967 crore. Similarly, the state government is distributing around 60,000 metric tonnes of rice under its SFSS, whose cost would be around Rs 25 crore, he said.