“The State Government has appointed 26 senior officials as nodal officers to ensure that the database of beneficiaries prepared for implementation of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) is faultless.”
The senior officials will visit some gram panchayats (GPs) and Wards in districts assigned to them to verify the beneficiary list. The issue was discussed at a high level meeting presided over by Chief Secretary GC Pati at the State Secretariat recently.
The process of identification of beneficiaries under NFSA has reached the final stage. As many as 105 lakh households comprising 395 lakh individuals have applied for new ration cards under NFSA. The applications received by the State Government are more than the ceiling for ration cards fixed by the Centre. The Centre has fixed a ceiling of 326 lakh individuals to be covered under the Act.
As there are 69 lakh more applications over the ceiling fixed by the Centre, the State Government has decided to exclude those found to be ineligible. The Department of Food Supply and Consumer Welfare is reported to have identified 12.65 lakh duplicate applications from the same individuals.
Besides, 4.24 lakh households having 16.2 lakh individuals have also been deleted from the list based on the Socio Economic Caste census data received from the Department of Panchayati Raj.
Official sources maintained that ineligible applicants will also be identified with the help of IBM Master Data Management (MDM) tool database of exclusion criteria including Government employees, income tax payers, vehicle owners and pensioners.
Prasanta Patnaik 
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