The process of getting food subsidies was not easily handled in the past, especially in a country like India that has so many people in need of food. However, after learning of the idea of ration cards practiced by countries in the west, the Indian Government decided to work with State Governments to implement the same throughout the country. This means creating a proper process of identification, financial stability to know who would be receiving how much food, and finally where and how the food would be dispensed to them.
Ration cards began with the need to gather all your personal information such as your name, address, date of birth and so on. One of the main aspects of ration cards at the time was that they gathered the number of members in a family. Unlike drivers licences and PAN cards which provide individual identification proof, the ration card helped secure the entire family. This also meant that people (especially wives) would have to delete their names from their parents or family ration cards and add it to their husband's ration cards when they moved after their marriage.
With time the Government needed to gather some more information about families since there were too many people collecting rations even when they could afford to pay for food grain. Here they created three types of ration cards catering to the different sections of society. These were namely Antyodaya Ration Card, APL ration cards, and BPL ration cards. The former belong to families who have an income lower than Rs 250 per month, while APL and BPL are like their names suggest, people living above and below the poverty line accordingly. With this information, the State Government’s could now allocate the right amounts of grain to the families who needed it the most. These details and coordination of these plans were tweaked across states since these were in the purview of the State Governments.
With time, the Government began adding other schemes to ration cards making them stronger and while causing further dependence on them. However, with the vast number of people using them, and the lack of proper checks on the cards, they were soon riddled with scams and used to take advantage of a perfectly good system. To solve these issues the Government began cancelling ration cards since they might have been fake and added a large number of the processes to the internet where they could be openly scrutinized by people. People no longer needed to travel to offices that were so far away and could get their work done through the internet. This also means that they could track the progress of their cards and the date that they would receive them. Most importantly it allowed the Government to track the number of people within their state using the system.
Disclaimer: This is published by https://rationcardagent.co.in/
