The Rajasthan government will cancel around 15% of close to one crore ration cards issued in the state by the end of this month, if the missing beneficiaries do not turn up for purchasing the highly subsidised foodgrain provided to them under the National Food Security Act (NFSA).

Since September, a section of the 4.4 crore ration card holders in the state have not lifted their monthly entitlement of subsidised foodgrain under NFSA. Each beneficiary under NFSA gets 5 kg foodgrain monthly at Rs 3, Rs 2 and Rs 1 per kg for rice, wheat and coarse grains, respectively.

According to Subodh Agarwal, principal secretary in Rajasthan’s food and civil supplies department, if those beneficiaries who have not lifted their provisions don’t turn up by month-end, they would be removed from the MGNREGA list and new category of people will be added instead.

“At this point, we are not assuming that these ration card holders are fake. In some cases, because of migration and deaths in the family, people have not been able to come to fair price shops (FPSs) to lift grains,” Agarwal told FE. He said those turning up by the end of this month for purchase of highly subsidised wheat under NFSA would be able to get the backlog of their entitlements for the last three months.

The Rajasthan government has installed electronic point of sale (ePoS) machines which track purchase of grains by beneficiaries in all the 25,000 fair price shops. The state government believes that the sudden drop in the number of buyers is due to ePoS-induced transparency which curtailed the scope of manipulation of purchase records and diversion of PDS grains to the open market.

However, the state government would be adding new categories of beneficiaries under NFSA after the deletion of those card holders’ names who did not pick up the subsidised grains. The new categories of beneficiaries could be AIDS patients, some of the primitive tribes, safai workers etc.

Officials say the state government wants to include more people as NFSA beneficiaries so that they get access to 5 kg of wheat each as monthly entitlement. “We do not want to give up our annual entitlement of around 2.7 million tonne of wheat for NFSA from the Centre,” a state government official said.

During the last one year, the Rajasthan government has given a facelift to 5,000-odd fair price shops in the state through collaboration with the country’s largest retailer Future Group.

Around 150-300 FMCG products are being sold through their outlets renamed as Annapurna Bhandars. He further said the state government would extend the scheme to another 20,000 such shops in the next few years. Earlier, the PDS stores in Rajasthan used to store only a limited number of products such as wheat, rice, sugar and kerosene.