More than 63,000 white ration cards have been deactivated by the Chief Rationing Officer (CRO), Hyderabad district, since June this year. The exercise, which was taken up to weed out fake cards, also resulted in more than 2.29 lakh names being removed from the database, and efforts are on to scrutinise all existing cards, said officials.
After the State government had asked the Civil Supplies Department to weed out fake ration cards, the CRO, Hyderabad district began conducting a door-to-door survey to scrutinise all existing cards in June. Since then, it has resulted in deactivation of 63,932 white ration cards, and 2,29,757 names from its database.
“Linking of ration cards with the Aadhaar database has helped us a lot. As of now, there are only 1.1 lakh unseeded names, which we will check soon,” said a senior official from the CRO’s office. He explained that when their departmental survey had begun, there were more than 4.5 lakh names in white ration cards which were not seeded with the Aadhaar card database.
According to data from the CRO’s office, as of now there are 6,34,605 white ration cards in Hyderabad district, in which 26,00,767 names of beneficiaries are enrolled. Apart from the 1.1 lakh cards which are not seeded yet, another 52,046 are still pending for confirmation. And thanks to efforts to weed out duplicate names and cards, officials have managed to achieve 92.79 per cent seeding of cards with the Aadhaar database.
“Due to the Intensive Household Survey, our work had slowed down, but now we will complete it. Also, once the survey data is available, we will try to see if we can utilise it to help us remove duplicate works,” said the official, and added that all deactivated cards are not necessarily duplicate. “Migration, death and double application are also reasons why there are excess cards,” he mentioned.
The official also said that they were activating white ration cards whenever people came forward to submit their Aadhaar cards as identity proof. Since June, 4,921 cards have been re-activated, statistics showed.
