-Economic and Political Weekly The platform known as the JAM Trinity (an acronym for Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers) may enable a shift from the current Public Distribution System, based on price subsidies, to the direct transfer of benefits. However, it is incorrect to argue that JAM technologies will necessarily lead to the demise of the PDS. State-level experiences of computerisation, recounted here, reveal that the same technologies can...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: States may have seized around 78,000 tonnes of pulses in raids till Monday, but it is taking time to release this huge quantity in the market to moderate the spiraling prices. This is because the officials need to follow the norms laid down in the Essential Commodities Act, which may take at least two to four weeks from the date of seizure. On Monday, arhar was...

-Business Standard The Centre had asked state governments to meet millers, retailers and wholesalers to make pulses available at reasonable prices Heeding the advice of the Centre, some state governments have started selling tur dal at lower rates of Rs 120-140 a kg through their own retail outlets. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are distributing a kg of tur dal at a highly subsidised rate of Rs 50 through Ration shops, while Tamil Nadu...

-Livemint.com The state is mapping and feeding Aadhaar and biometric information of ration card holders into a server Bengaluru: Karnataka food and civil supplies minister Dinesh Gundu Rao on Wednesday said the state’s fair price shops will go digital within the next three months. The state is mapping and feeding Aadhaar and biometric information of ration card holders into a server. All transactions in the public distribution system (PDS) will have to...

-Scroll.in   An audit of Ration shops after the introduction of Aadhaar revealed that many genuine beneficiaries couldn’t collect food grain due to system glitches. The Modi government’s insistence on the use of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based unique identification project, to weed out “ghosts, fakes, duplicates” from social welfare schemes is counterproductively excluding genuine beneficiaries from the programmes. In Andhra Pradesh, an official audit conducted after Ration shops adopted the Aadhaar system revealed that many...