The Hindu Business Line : PDS ‘smart cards’ a manna for vendors

Mumbai, March 1 The ‘smart card’ industry is pleased with the Finance Minister Mr P. Chidambaram’s announcement in the Budget that the Government would introduce an electronic card-based mechanism for ensuring proper distribution of essential commodities.

The move opens another revenue stream for vendors who currently derive their income principally from mobile phone operators. The Finance Minister said that Haryana and the Union Territory of Chandigarh will introduce on a pilot basis a ‘smart card’ based system to deliver food grains under the Public Distribution System at affordable prices.

“Under the new scheme, the smart cards would serve as ration cards. The card would also help in maintaining inventories at the Government’s end,” said Mr Chandrashekhar Murthy, Managing Director of Pragra Infratech, an Ahmedabad-based IT firm, which produces 5 lakh smart cards every day.

Taking it forward

The Government is expected to expand the smart card-based PDS mechanism to other parts of the country in the next one year, said Mr Sudhir Rao, Managing Director of Bartronics India Ltd, which is associated with the National Informatics Center, a body that serves as the nodal agency for the implementation of smart cards in India.

There are about 4.89 lakh PDS outlets in the country which cater to about 6.52 crore families below the poverty line, according to the department of food and public distribution.

Given the robust demand environment from both the telecom and non-telecom space, the country would require about 200-300 million smart cards in the next five years, according to Mr Jagdish Rajpurohit, Secretary, Smart Card Forum of India.

From the Government’s perspective, smart cards eliminate accounting hassles such as maintaining bulky ledgers. The availability of grains in the PDS system can be made known to controllers of the civil supplies department at the click of a mouse, said Mr Murthy, adding that the smart card could cost between Rs 40 and Rs 100.

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