Year later, One Nation, One Ration off to sluggish begin

Around one month in the past, Anuj Kumar, a brick kiln employee in Gujarat’s Sathara, heard from a neighborhood NGO employee that the federal government had began a brand new scheme — One Nation, One Ration Card (ONORC).
“The purvata mamlatdar [provisions official] asked me to link my Aadhaar, which I did. Still, nothing came of it. Yeh sab kehne ki baat hai (They just say such things). Us poor, we never get anything,” he stated.
A local of Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur, Kumar was making ready for a 25-hour bus journey to his hometown together with his household of 10 in worry of a lockdown.
In Rajasthan’s Bhilwara, a brick kiln commerce union wrote to the district logistics officer on March 9, stating that 20,000 migrant employees in about 200 factories had been unable to obtain rations below the ONORC, regardless of a month passing for the reason that state authorities’s announcement that the scheme had been carried out.
Ration card portability has been the cornerstone in migrant labour discussions, together with a draft migrant labour coverage by Niti Aayog this 12 months.
In the backdrop of final 12 months’s migrant disaster, the federal government held excessive their efforts to develop the ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’ scheme, enabling migrant employees to obtain entitled meals grains from any truthful value store within the nation utilizing their Aadhaar card. In his June 2020 deal with, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated, “The biggest benefit of the One Nation One Ration Card scheme will be to those poor workers who leave their villages and migrate elsewhere for livelihood.”
With native lockdowns step by step growing and with cities witnessing one other spherical of migrant exodus, interviews with researchers, area employees, and migrant employees they work with present the logistical hurdles nonetheless going through the programme a 12 months after its preliminary implementation. Transactions of the scheme, though rising, stay low. In complete, solely somewhat over 50,000 transactions have been made throughout state borders, of which just about 90 per cent has been previously 12 months, in keeping with the Integrated Management of Public Distribution System portal.
The scheme started selecting tempo in July 2020, when it was enabled in 20 states and UTs. April noticed over 11,000 transactions – double the quantity in March – with Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Haryana seeing the majority of transactions.
“The programme needs more coordination. We haven’t worked it out, but it should be possible to fix. It needs to be fully operationalised, which hasn’t happened yet,” stated Amitabh Kundu, a outstanding labour economist who has led a number of migration-related authorities committees, together with an ongoing migrant survey by the Labour Ministry.

“The scheme is not working,” stated Arvind Ghritlahre, a block chief for Jan Sahas in Pachri, Chhattisgarh. “We did a survey of migrants from Mahasamund to Ranchi. Several have tried multiple times but they have been told that it doesn’t work.” Okay R Shyam Sundar, professor of HRD at Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, stated ONORC continues to be a “mirage”. “It will take a considerable amount of time to convert into reality,” he stated.
Asked about points with the scheme, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution supplied numbers for intra- and inter-state transactions to state that “ONORC is being implemented with great vigour across the country”.

“Moving population has been availing the benefits of the same in huge number,” the spokesperson stated. “As the awareness about it gradually settles in the population of different demographics, its success will deepen further … It’s an incremental process. You cannot judge the face of the building by looking at the structure which is in works.”