VIJAYAWADA, September 9, 2015
Updated: September 9, 2015 05:47 IST
M.Srinivas
They will be mandatory for availing welfare schemes, subsidies
Ration cards will soon be a thing of the past, as the government is seriously considering replacing them with Aadhaar-enabled smart cards.
A high-level meeting called by Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu recently discussed the modalities to be adopted for implementing the project across the State.
“Smart cards can store information about family members along with their Aadhaar card details, beneficiaries of government schemes and pension identity numbers. While ration cards have only names and age of family members, the unique smart cards will have all details of the family, and it will be made mandatory for availing government schemes and subsidies,” said Krishna District Collector Babu A.
As many as 13 companies have come forward with specifications for smart cards.
The government has constituted a committee with J. Satyanarayana, Advisor to Government (Information Technology), as Chairman. Civil Supplies Commissioner and Director, Information Technology; Electronics and Communications Department Secretary, Andhra Pradesh Technology Services Managing Director, an officer from the National Informatics Centre and the Krishna Collector will be members of the committee.
The committee will examine the specifications submitted by the companies before finalising the design of the cards. It will later submit a report to the government. Under Sections 9, 10 and 13 of the National Food Security Act-2013, eligible households have to be identified, and new ration cards have to be issued to them in the name of a woman as head of the family.
A senior State government official said the Union government had two central servers in New Delhi and Bangalore for maintaining data of Aadhaar cardholders.
“If something goes wrong at the server in New Delhi, a message will pop up, requesting officials to contact the server in Bangalore for details of the cardholder. We want to emulate the same mechanism in Andhra Pradesh to avoid technical glitches,” he said.
While the Tamil Nadu government has allocated Rs. 318 crore for developing smart cards, the government in Harayana has also decided to extend similar facility to cardholders.
The Goa government is considering the same proposal to replace the traditional ration card booklets with smart cards.