BHUBANESWAR: Chief Secretary Gokul Chandra Pati on Saturday directed Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department to expedite the process for identification of priority households under National Food Security Act (NFSA) by adopting information technology tools.
Preparations are on to implement NFSA in the State in a phased manner and the process is likely to be completed by July, 2015. Identification of households will be made as per National Population Register (NPR) data and socio-economic census data, Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Secretary MS Padhi told reporters. Pati reviewed the progress at a high-level meeting here.
NFSA seeks to address the issue of food security in a life cycle approach and aims to supply entitled quantity of food grains and meals specified under the scheme.
The scheme envisages uniform entitlement of five kg per person per month for priority households. Existing Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) households will get 35 kg of rice per household per month as before.
It has been provided in the Act that the eldest woman of the household, aged 18 or above, will be head of the household for issue of ration cards. There will be two-tier grievance redressal mechanism - one at the district level and the other at the State level.
Transparency and accountability provisions like placing priority households records in public domain, social audit and vigilance committees will be put in place. The scheme is being piloted in Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and Bhubaneswar block in the first phase. t has been planned to roll out the scheme in phase-II in all the urban local bodies (ULBs) of the State and remaining blocks of Khurda district.
The remaining 275 blocks of 29 districts will be covered during Phase-III. Nearly 1.70 lakh applications have been collected so far. Draft notification of list of priority households which will be placed before gram sabhas/palli sabhas, panchayats and ‘nagarpalika’ meetings before finalisation of the list of beneficiaries was also discussed.