Currently, 85.5% Ration Cards of at least one member of family are seeded with Aadhaar number, MP Danve Raosaheb Dadarao had informed Lok Sabha on July 17, when Shiv Sena MP Ranjan Vichare asked him about the number of ration cards linked with Aadhaar. In Maharastra, 1,42,47,780 ration cards have been linked with Aadhaar cards according to the details provided by the minister in the annexure. Dadarao said that this was being done for "better targeting of food subsidies". The minister mentioned the Ministry of Consumer Affairs' “end-to-end computerisation of TPDS (Targeted Public Distribution System) operations” scheme in collaboration with all States and UTs which is done on a "cost sharing basis". Digitisation of ration cards and other databases, computerisation of supply chain management are a part of this scheme. The digitisation of ration cards data has been completed in all 36 states & UTs, Dadaro informed Lok Sabha. A total of 2.98 crore bogus ration cards have been deleted between 2013-18, said Dadarao, when asked if linking e-ration cards with Aadhaar card had helped the government in cancellation of bogus ration cards. Minister of Consumer Affairs, Ramvilas Paswan, however, had given a slightly different number on the number of ration cards seeded with Aadhaar - 85.41% - in the Rajya Sabha on June 26. Following is a table of of ration cards issued, ration cards linked with Aadhaar and deleted/cancelled ration cards, as presented by Paswan in Rajya Sabha: [embeddoc url="https://www.medianama.com/wp-content/uploads/Au69-1.docx" download="all" viewer="microsoft"] Remember the govt's idea of a central database in the Economic…
