Public Food Distribution System and its challenges
The Public Food Distribution System (PFDS), like in other developing countries, plays an important role in the food and agricultural sector of Bangladesh. Some important roles of PFDS include (a) making food grains available to poor households, (b) distributing food during emergencies, (c) providing incentive prices to producers to encourage domestic production, and (d) stabilizing market prices to prevent excessive price rises.
There are many sources of inefficiency associated with the Public Food Distribution System (PFDS). An important problem is the inaccurate identification of beneficiary households, which has resulted in eligible households being excluded (exclusion errors) and some ineligible households being included (inclusion errors) in the system. Another major shortcoming of the PFDS is that beneficiaries often do not receive their full entitlement. This can happen either due to the wilful diversion of grains by the dealers to the open market or the non-availability of grains owing to poor planning of inventory and shipments because of lack of visibility across different levels of the PFDS supply chain.
In the past there have been multiple reported cases in the media where the subsidized food grains, distributed from Government depots against these schemes, are either found to be sold in the retail market or being distributed to non-targeted population by the dealers. This shows that the current method of Truck Sale and Shop Sale as a mode of Public Food Distribution has a certain level of uncertainty in terms of getting the right quantity at the right price to the right beneficiary.
Read this: End-to-end Computerization of TPDS
How digital empowerment can help
The Government can take technology driven initiative to eliminate any possibility of leakage through the dealer network based distribution system by arranging the distribution to beneficiaries directly from a designated counter in Government depots after digital authentication of beneficiaries and validation of entitlement and receipt till date. The payment from the beneficiaries can be directly linked to the centralised finance and accounting system (iBAS), thus making the end-to-end transaction full proof and transparent. This can be done through introduction of POS devices at the depots for biometric and smart card based authentication of the beneficiaries and digital validation of allocation against individual entitlement of grains/atta/flour.
A digital record of transaction will get printed for the beneficiary once the payment is received and allocated food stock is delivered to the beneficiary. The beneficiary will have the option to log any complaint electronically on their individual allotment vis-à-vis entitlement. The same will be monitored till closure by the Government officials on a case to case basis.
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