The coalition government, which launched the free gas cylinder scheme as a Diwali gift, will issue new ration cards to all the eligible poor in the state as a New Year’s gift in January next year. The government has intensified the effort to redesign the existing cards in the state and provide them with a new design to all the old and new beneficiaries.
The Civil Supplies Department is working to design ration cards and grant new cards to the eligible poor without putting a financial burden on the government. The previous YCP government boasted that the issuance of new ration cards would continue as a continuous process. It boasted that those who applied would be granted them within five days.
However no new cards were issued even after thousands of applications have been made by couples who have married and set up new homes, and those who are mired in poverty. The Jagan government has slowly stalled the issue of issuing new cards, thinking that granting ration cards to all of them would be an additional financial burden.
With this, in addition to the 30,611 applications received by the previous government for new cards, 46,918 applications were received for split cards, 2,13,007 for addition of members to existing cards, 36,588 for deletion, 8,263 for change of address, and 685 for surrender of cards, a total of 3,36,072 applications are still pending.
In order to issue new cards to the new couples, their names have to be removed from the ration cards already existing in their families. There are currently 1.48 crore ration cards in the state. Of these, 90 lakh cards have been identified by the Center under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). Only those cards are being provided with free rice, lentil, sugar and other commodities.
The state government has to bear the entire financial burden of the subsidy provided on lentils, sugar, jowar, ragi and other commodities along with free rice for the remaining cards. The state government has been demanding for a long time to bring PHH (Priority Household) ration cards under the NFSA ambit, but there has been no positive response from the Center.
The Civil Supplies Department is already making plans to issue new ration cards to over 1.5 lakh poor families in January without any additional burden on the government.
