All existing ration card holders as well as online applicants will have to provide their Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers by March 31 to facilitate the Department of Food and Civil Supplies to weed out bogus cards.
Deputy Commissioner of Mysuru district C. Shikha told The Hindu that the last date applies to online applicants for ration cards as well as the existing card holders.
Failure to provide EPIC number by the last date will lead to rejection of applications and suspension of the already issued ration cards.
“We will initially suspend the ration cards that are not verified with EPIC number and later take a decision on revoking them,” said an official of the Food and Civil Supplies Department.
Last year, the department had made it mandatory for all members of a family, who are above 21 years of age, to provide the EPIC number for verification. Several deadlines have been issued earlier, the official added.
Deputy Director of Food and Civil Supplies Department Rameshwarappa said the department had received 1.76 lakh online applications for the Below Poverty Line (BPL) as well as above the Poverty Line (APL) ration cards in the district. “About 40,000 applicants are yet to submit their EPIC numbers and such applications will be considered as suspect and rejected”, he said.
Similiarly, of the 4.25 lakh ration cards issued prior to 2010, Mr. Rameshwarappa said as many 60,000 were yet to submit their EPIC details.
In a statement here, Ms. Shikha said the Department has introduced a system in which the EPIC number can be sent from the mobile phone of the head of the family using short message service (SMS) to a designated number. Persons, who do not possess a mobile phone, can submit their EPIC details to the nearest photo bio-centre, gram panchayat office, Mysore One centre or Atalji Jana Snehi Centre.
Meanwhile, an official of the Food and Civil Supplies Department pointed out that the procedure had been marred by receipt of several invalid EPIC numbers. “In many instances, the EPIC numbers were old or invalid”, he said. In some cases, there had been a mismatch during the electronic validation of the EPIC numbers with the Election Commission of India (ECI) database, he added.
