Bengaluru: The Kerala government has launched a ₹ 250 crore project with the support of UN World Food Programme (WFP) to make its entire public distribution system (PDS) paperless within a year.

A first of its kind in India, the project will introduce point of sale machines (PoS) in the existing 14,000 ration shops in the state, review the current beneficiary list and link them with their respective ration shops through bio-metric identification systems.

WFP, one of the world’s largest relief agencies working on food security, is providing the technical support for the project. This is the first big-ticket initiative taken up by the agency in India after it changed its focus in 2013 to provide support systems for PDS distribution from giving direct food aid in the country, said Jan Delbabare, WFP country deputy director.

Once the project is implemented, the government will be able to follow the details of rice bags right from the warehouses of Food Corporation of India to wholesale dealers through GPS trackers and plug any leakage.

At the consumer-end, fingerprints will be used to identify beneficiaries at the PDS shops that will be equipped with Internet-ready PoS machines connected to a central server. The server will store digitized data of all beneficiaries from the state’s 34 million people, including their Aadhaar numbers.

“This will basically ensure transparency in the system. The pilot phase will be finished in the select 14 ration shops within three to four months and we will finish the state-level implementation in a year," said Anup Jacob, Kerala’s minister for food and civil supplies.

The state government contacted WPF last year, after reviewing a study by the agency that looked into the best ways to reform PDS in India.

“It will focus more on end-to-end computerization so that there is no more possibility of subsidized food going anywhere else. Setting up a grievance redressal cell and a study to review the viability of existing authorized retail shops will also be part of the project," said Delbabare.

He said the agency is working on a similar project in Odisha, but with relatively a lesser scope and range.

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