Minister for Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs, Chowdhary Zulfkar Ali, called on Minister for Finance & Planning, Small Savings, State Lotteries, Consumer Affairs, Legal Metrology & Civil Supplies in Telangana Government Etela Rajender and held deliberations on various issues pertaining to food, civil supplies and legal metrology.Zulfkar also held meeting with the officers of the Civil Supplies Department in Hyderabad wherein he was given presentation on the success story of e-PDS in Telanagana. He was briefed about the effective system of e-PDS, issues and challenges faced by the Telangana Government while implementing e-PDS.The Minister was apprised that Civil Supplies Department Telangana is effectively utilizing the e-PDS online software. He was informed that the technology is used to seed the ration card data base with Aadhaar numbers which eliminated bogus, dead and duplicate cards/units with Aadhaar authentication. He was also briefed about Supply Chain Management - Vehicle Tracking system and FP shop automation.
About the methodology, he was given information that Tehsildars maintain and manage cards by making inactive/active and transfer and tagging of cards to shops etc wherein total card strength is taken and the dynamic key registers are generated for the month for the entire state. After the Commissioner approval, key registers are released to be printed as sale registers for all fair price shops, the Minister was told.Praising the Telangana Government for efficient PDS in the state, Chowdhary Zulfkar Ali said that such a system will benefit Jammu & Kashmir at large as it increases transparency in the system eliminates chances of pilferages.He said that J&K Government is also heading towards cashless economy and Department of FCS&CA is playing key role in making all transactions cashless. He said that Point of Sale Machines are being installed and supply chain management will start soon to make the system most transparent. He said that online allocation of foodgrains which has decreased manual work has already been started.He also visited various Fair Price Shops in Hyderabad to know about ground level functioning of automated machines used in these shops.