| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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AePDS is a complete business process re-engineering of age-old PDS bringing both simplicity and sophistication for millions of families to withdraw their monthly food entitlements (subsidy) in a hassle-free way. AePDS offers timely rations to most vulnerable sections of the population, allowing them improving their livelihoods.
The digitization of supply chain in AePDS prevent leakages of food stock improving savings in stock and subsidy. An important innovative features of AePDS is its portability, which allows beneficiaries to withdraw ration from anywhere in the state. Significant proportion of PDS beneficiaries are wage seekers, who migrate to different places for their livelihood. Portability allows them to withdraw ration wherever they go in the state, taking care of their food security.
Another innovative feature is PoS devices is linked with the electronic weighing scale, delivering exact quantity of commodities to beneficiaries increasing transparency bringing significant reduction in siphoning of stock by dealers.
Cashless PDS has helped beneficiaries make cashless transactions along with keeping their bank accounts active. Secondly cashless PDS makes all FPS dealers as business correspondents, providing banking services right at the door step of beneficiaries. This shall bring great economic and social inclusivity to rural population in future through financial inclusivity.
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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After pilots, the initiative of Aadhaar enabled Public Distribution System (AePDS) has been launched and implemented in the country in Krishna District since March 2015 in 2.166 FPS. Subsequent to the successful implementation of AePDS in Krishna district, it has been rolled out across Andhra Pradesh state in all the 13 districts in 28.350 FPSs, covering a population of 38,2 million.
Project Team: The Project was initiated by the District Collector of Krishna,Sri.Babu.A, IAS, who spearheaded the initiative from its very conception. He played a key role in architecting technology-rich initiative, and monitoring its implementation across the state. He played a vital role in the implementation of the roadmap initially drawn up, by co-coordinating with all the stakeholders and pursuing the entire task in a parallel manner and made all the stakeholders work as a team.
NIC played a key role as a Technology Solution Provider in developing the application and adhering to the timelines. Sri A Guru Prasad, Scientist along with team members Smt. C. Radha Scientist; Smt. Annapurna, Scientist and Smt. Mary Alice from NIC, provided the critical technical support in the detailed design and development of the central architecture of the application and its key components. NIC has been providing continuous and valuable support, maintaining application and IT infrastructure ensuring change management and smooth functioning of the Project.
The Department of Civil Supplies, Government of Andhra Pradesh successfully geared up procuring the devices and hardware and played a key role in the implementation process. The Department re-engineered a number of processes to suit the technology, trained its staff, followed up the progress of AePDS and adhered to the timelines. AePDS being a citizen-centric and a 'demand side' project where the incipient demand always existed, there was extensive cooperation from every stakeholder by adapting new technology. Government of Andhra Pradesh has successfully implemented Aadhaar-enabled Public Distribution System in all 28.447 FPSs across the state, covering 13.425.833 cardholders covering 38.496.397 food units. The application is well stabilized with an average of 2-2,5 million transactions during the first week of every month, covering across all the 13 districts across the state. By the 10th of every month, 85 percent of the beneficiaries across the state are availing their ration in one go. Other than ration cardholders,55.604 Anganwadies (Nutrition Day Care Centres) under ICDS scheme and 44.593 schools under midday meals are distributed commodities with bio-authentification facility.
AePDS is implemented in Andhra Pradesh as follows:
a) Districts: 13
b) Divisions: 49
c) Mandals: 670
d) Villages: 17.751
e) Fair Price Shops: 28.942
f) Total No. of Cards: 13.530.437
(NFSA Cards: 95,71,660 + State PDS Cards: 3.959.777 )
g) Total No. of Beneficiaries: 38.291.110
h) Seeding Percentage: 99,94%
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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Starting in January 2015, the AePDS program was first implemented in Krishna district in 511 pilot FPSs in all the mandals. It was then scaled up to all the 2.161 FPSs in the district and finally across all 13 districts in Andhra Pradesh. It was implemented in three phases.
In Phase I, Aadhaar seeding was done for all the ration cards available in the state. Extensive training programmes were conducted to earn the trust of dealers by explaining the strength of Aadhaar in empowering beneficiaries. With well-defined application and robust architecture, the pilot succeeded and was extended to all 2.161 shops in the Krishna district.
In Phase II, electronic weighing machines were integrated with epos for e-weighing and coupled with supply chain management for accountability of stock movement. The software was rolled out in all 13 districts, covering 28.447 FPSs across the state. Online dashboard was created with transparency of cardholders data, allotment of commodities stock movement, stock position in each shop and distribution. 20.810 IRIS readers were supplied to FPSs for authentication whenever biometric failure occurs. 24/7 helpdesk was provided at state level, plus one in each district to resolve issues rapidly. Online grievance monitoring system was made available with workflow to address the issues.
Under Phase III of implementation, portability was included allowing each beneficiary to draw ration from any shop across state. 55.604 Aanganwadies (Nutrition Day Care Centres) under ICDS department and 44.593 schools for midday meals were distributed through Aadhaar.
After stabilising the system, AePDS got upgraded to JanDhanPDS by integrating Jan Dhan accounts of beneficiaries with dealers’ ones for seamless transfer of money.
No cost is involved in software development and hardware resources as application software is developed by NIC, Andhra Pradesh and resources are provided by Andhra Pradesh State Data Centre (SDC). The system helped the GoI and Government of Andhra Pradesh saving subsidies up to Rs.80 to 100 millions every month from each district of Andhra Pradesh, providing a substantial return on investment on the ePOS devices.
The AePDS leveraged the Aadhaar platform for validation of beneficiaries. The entire ration card database was seeded with respective Aadhaar numbers, weeding out ineligible beneficiaries. The AePDS application is one of its kind, where genuine PDS beneficiaries withdraw ration by Aadhar-based biometric and iris authentication on a PoS terminal. The application is provided with bilingual voice-overs in English and Telugu languages to allow users to understand the process of collecting ration. For disabled people or old people, in case of biometric failures, IRIS and Fusion Finger authentication is provided. The AePDS application has got well streamlined, replacing the manual process with Aadhaar-enabled authentication through PoS device, providing rations to more than 30 million beneficiaries across all the FPSs for the last two years and two months without any constraints. AePDS is an open source solution.
The site epos.ap.gov.in gives comprehensive details on the AePDS program where a user can drill-down to each FPS level on the PDS transactions across the state. 100% ration card database with the member details is available on http://epdsap.ap.gov.in. The Ration Card application is a workflow-based application, which runs up to the Mandal/Taluk supply office for creation and modification of cards. Supply-Chain Management (SCM) covers monitoring of food grains allocation, storage and stock movement starting from the base depots of FCI till the FPS. The information related to the supply-chain is made available in public domain through the Transparency Portal (http://scm.ap.gov.in/).
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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The main stakeholders involved in the design and implementation of AePDS were:
1. District Administration of Krishna conceptualised and piloted the scheme. District Administration was main driver of the scheme. The District Collector ensured the program is implemented in all FPS of the district by providing training periodically. 24/7 helpdesk, opening of bank accounts for all beneficiaries coordinating with banks and linking them with ration card database to facilitate Cashless PDS.
2. The Department of Food and Civil Supplies was involved in digitizing the humungous 13,5 million ration cards database and seeding with Aadhaar numbers. Servers and ePoS devices (including weighment and IRIS readers) for hosting and execution of the application are provided by the department to all FPS dealers with maintenance contract for 5 years.
3. NIC enabled all software integrations for hassle-free transactions at the FPS with the following salient features:(i) 18,4million transactions are processed per month; (ii) ability to handle high transaction volume growth through high-end servers, optimized queries and applications, streaming replication with DR facility; (iii) on average 2 minutes is taken to process the transaction including retrieval of ration card details, beneficiary authentication, selection of commodities, precision weighment of ration (connected through Bluetooth), receipt generation; (iv) accurate output as per the defined standards of Civil supplies Department.
4. UIDAI provided Aadhaar-related services with <1% delay in service delivery and maintenance.
5. FPS dealers are important stakeholders who have significant role in delivering food services to beneficiaries. The portability has triggered the competition among dealers, increasing their efficiency in service delivery.
6. Banks provided cashless gateway and required training to FPS dealers addressing technical issues on settlement and reconciliation.
7. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) supported banks by allowing uninterrupted services in ON-US and OFF-US transactions and assisting banks in settlements and reconciliation.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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The following are the most important outputs making AePDS program very effective:
1. Rs. 12 billion savings in terms of subsidies since its implementation. These savings can be utilized for bringing in new reforms to PDS through infrastructure and services and also for bringing in new welfare programs for the citizens.
2. More than 30 million beneficiaries have been withdrawing their rations across all the FPS in the state without any constraints. Around 18,4 million transactions are processed per month across the 28.942 FPS in the state.
3. Introduction of Cashless PDS has enabled 1.688.548 cashless transactions at FPS successfully so far, providing ease and convenience to the consumers. Beneficiaries can now opt for cashless transactions in PDS given the currency crunch following the demonetization policy in India.
4. Cashless PDS also helps access rural poor to access all their banking services at their door step with an FPS dealer enabling their financial inclusion.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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• Training and Capacity enhancement: training of all the field functionaries especially the FPS dealers and civil supplies officers was one of the important challenges in AePDS. Periodical trainings were conducted by district administration to the field officials on the intricacies of the program. Trainings were provided on the operation of the PoS terminal, the utilization of scanning devices, electronic weighment, etc. Unfortunately, the mundaneness of manual PDS also had made civil supplies personnel out-dated. Therefore all the field functionaries were trained on issuing indents, GPS monitoring in supply chain, working of PoS terminals,…
• Connectivity: Connectivity was the next biggest hindrance in AePDS. Connectivity was achieved with a mix of GPRS, Broadband, WiMAX and CDMA technologies, as per the applicability of the FPS location. Survey of telecom service providers for strength of their network across all FPS and SIMs of two service providers with best signal strength was provided to all shops.
• Iris authentication: To facilitate easy authentication process for old age people especially those with poor biometrics, iris authentication was introduced. Integration of Iris scanners with PoS terminal was taken up enabling seamless iris authentication in PDS for the first time in the country.
• Mapping Bank accounts: Seeding of UID (Aadhaar No.), Mobile No. and Bank Account of the beneficiaries was the next tedious work in implementing Cashless JanDhanAePDS. For e.g., in Krishna district, all 1,2 million cardholding families were facilitated to open a bank account with various banks which was seeded with CBS (Core banking solutions) and mapped with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to enable cashless transactions at FPS.
• Ensuring seamless, hassle-free and prompt service to ration card holders of PDS convinced the highest political and bureaucratic echelons who were happy with the efficiency and accountability triggered through the program.
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