Department Of Food & Supplies : Public Distribution System (PDS)

Public Distribution System (PDS) means distribution of essential commodities to a large number of people through a network of Fair Price Shops (FPS) on a recurring basis. The commodities distributed are Wheat, Rice, Sugar, and Kerosene. To automate the manual process of delivering the commodities to the beneficiary and provide a mechanism that provides proper verification of beneficiary, the Department of Food and Supplies, Government of Haryana initiated the project of issuance of Smart Card based Public distribution system. About 52 Lakh eligible families were issued Smart Ration Cards as per their category.

The monthly entitlements of the family cardholder were stored in the card and all the transactions at FPS were performed only on the production of the card by one of the authorized members of the family. The fingerprint template of the authorized member was stored in the card to ensure that transaction happens in presence of the beneficiary.

This project was implemented in conjunction with the Haryana State Federation of Consumers (CONFED) under the Haryana Government. The Smart Card usage provided the following security to the System:

• The card provides the mechanism for establishing the proof of identity of beneficiaries at the field.
• The card provides a mechanism to verify the authenticity of the card in the field.
• The card is secured against unauthorized  cloning.
• The card securely stores the application data for field transactions, such that it cannot be accessible/tampered by unauthorized agencies.
• The System provides the mechanism so that only authorized agencies are able to perform the card data modification to complete the field transactions.