- The government has extended the inter-state portability of ration cards between Kerala-Karnataka and Rajasthan-Haryana to implement ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’.
- These two new clusters will join the existing State pairs of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as well as Maharashtra and Gujarat.
- One nation one ration card scheme is all about inter-state portability of ration cards.It enables the beneficiaries who are taking food grains under the Public Distribution System(PDS) to access the same benefits if they happen to migrate from one part of the country to the other in a seamless manner.
- The Union Government plans to extend the One nation one ration card scheme to all the states by June 2020 to enable the portability of the food security card.
- This will provide freedom to the beneficiaries as they will not be tied to any one PDS shop and reduce their dependence on shop owners and curtail instances of corruption.
- However,there are various challenges such as (a)To update beneficiary data when a person migrates for a shorter span (b)Electronic point of sale(EPoS) machines are there in only 77% ration shops (c)Very few EPoS machines are in high-migration states like West Bengal and Bihar.
