A major revamp of Telangana State Civil Supplies Corporation is on the cards, for improving its functional efficiency, with addition of five wings — information technology, enforcement, finance, technical and engineering.
Initiatives by IT wing will include enabling of Aadhaar-linked payments and e-POS terminals doubling up as micro ATMs in all the 17,500 fair price shops in the state, Commissioner Civil Supplies C.V.Anand said at a press briefing here on Tuesday.
The measures have been tried in 620 FP shops in Siddipet on an experimental basis, and will be implemented all over the State by January 26. Iris scanning too will be introduced in the shops in addition to biometrics. Weighing scales and voice-over facilities will be provided towards improving transparency in operations.
IT initiatives
Tablet phones are being given to the IKP volunteers and marketing staff at paddy purchase centres under Online Payment Management Systems (OPMS) to enable online payments to farmers.
The entire fleet of 1150 trucks used for transport of essential commodities will be equipped with GPS devices, and their movements will be tracked from the soon to be launched central command centre.
Use of Geofencing technology will ensure that alerts are sent to authorities concerned if the vehicles go off the boundaries.
CCTV cameras installed at the warehouses will be linked to the joint collectors’ offices of the respective districts.
A Social media centre would be set up to get alerts from public on activities of the department employees in the field.
Office revamp
For proper enforcement, the State office will be divided into five wings, and a team of retired police and commercial taxes officers will be pressed into service for each division. Retired employees will be employed for finance wing too, apart from hiring the services of chartered accountants while the technical wing will have outsourced candidates hired from Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University.
“With a mere ₹8 crore expenditure for all these measures, hundreds of crores of savings can be ensured. The Board has already given its approval. State government will not have to bear the burden, as we are going to utilise central funding,” he said. Tough action will be taken against millers who are defaulting on delivery of custom milled rice (CMR). The default in exchange of gunny bags for many years has resulted in loss of ₹5 crore, which is being recovered from the millers. The Corporation would be saving ₹14 crore by shifting to road transport from rail.
