The Government of India is working on a plan to start “One Nation One Ration Card” scheme for the beneficiaries, mainly migrant workers, to access the Public Distribution System from any PDS shop across the nation.
The Union Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Shri Ram Vilas Paswan asserted that the Government is going to implement “One nation-one ration card” scheme in the whole country by 30th June, 2020.
Aim of the Scheme – “One nation-one ration card”
Scheme aims to provide freedom to the beneficiaries, as they will not be tied to single PDS shop, lessen their dependence on shop owners and curb corruption. One Nation One Ration Card scheme will also allow portability of food security benefits. This means poor migrant workers will be able to buy subsidised rice and wheat from any ration shop in the country.
More About One Nation One Ration Card| UPSC – IAS
The target is to finish the formalities of the scheme in 1 year and linking all the ration cards all over the country with Aadhar cards and organizing food grain distribution mechanism in its entirety through Point of Sale (PoS)machine is in the final stage.
The availability of Point of Sale (PoS) machines need to be ensured at all the PDS shops to implement the scheme.
PoS machines are available at all PDS shops in different states like Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and few other others but 100% availability is essential to provide the benefit across the country.
Aadhaar linkage needed for it to work; – The Supreme Court has earlier ruled that an Aadhaar card is mandatory to avail oneself of government schemes and subsidies, however, confusion prevails over whether it is mandatory to link ration cards to Aadhaar cards.
What is point of sale terminal (POS terminal) machine? | UPSC – IAS
A point of sale terminal (POS terminal) is an electronic device used to process card payments at retail locations. A POS terminal generally does the following:
Reads the information off a customer’s credit or debit card
Checks whether the funds in a customer’s bank account are sufficient
Transfers the funds from the customer’s account to the seller’s account (or at least, accounts for the transfer with the credit card network)
