Ahmedabad, 4 January, 2013

The government of Gujarat has taken a decision to allocate barcoded ration cards to all 1.9 crore beneficiaries under the Public Distribution System in Gujarat by June 2013. This was announced after state ministers Shri Bhupendrasinh Chudasama and Govindbhai Patel reviewed the progress of the distribution of barcoded ration cards with higher officials of Gujarat’s Food and Civil Supplies department today.

A barcode ensures that only the rightful beneficiary gets the benefit of the scheme. In the entire country, only Gujarat has implemented a totally transparent and computerized barcoded ration card system. The Supreme Court has in the past asked other states to emulate the Gujarat model of providing barcoded ration cards.

Form filling/submitting exercise for barcoded ration cards was kicked off in June 2010. The data entry task was completed by December 2011. Since January 2012, as many as 33 lakh beneficiaries have already been given barcoded ration cards. Such cards are being distributed from 17,290 sasta anaj shops. The process is going on.

In the past, under the pilot project, barcoded ration cards were distributed in one selected shop per taluka covering a total of 225 talukas.

In November 2012, Gujarat’s Barcoded ration card project won an award from the Computer Society of India in Hyderabad. Representatives of the World food programme, Bihar state and others had visited Gujarat to study this project.