Technical glitch dogs e-PoS system

Technical glitch dogs e-PoS system
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Highlights

The Electronic Point of Sale (e-PoS) pilot project for fair price shops in Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy districts is facing some technical glitches. Despite standing in long queues, many a ration card holders have to return empty-handed from the fair price shop, as their finger prints are not accepted by the machine provided to the dealers by Civil Supplies Department.

Hyderabad: The Electronic Point of Sale (e-PoS) pilot project for fair price shops in Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy districts is facing some technical glitches.

Despite standing in long queues, many a ration card holders have to return empty-handed from the fair price shop, as their finger prints are not accepted by the machine provided to the dealers by Civil Supplies Department.

In Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy districts, the Civil Supplies Department is implementing the technology in 50 fair price shops under PDS (Public Distribution System).

The adoption of new technology and implementation coupled with technical problems is proving to be a hurdle to the ration card holders as well as the dealers.

The inordinate delay at the fair price shop, in trying to match the impression of genuine beneficiary with that of recorded in Aadhaar Card, by the dealer is also causing other beneficiaries lose patience. It is learnt that on several occasions, the dealer had to face the ire of ration card holder.

“It has become a time-consuming exercise for the dealer, who has to ensure that finger impression is matched with that of Aadhaar impressions. Since it is the only criteria for beneficiaries to get ration, we are asking them to come during lean hours,” said V R Gupta, a fair price shop dealer.

While Telangana is yet to spread the technology to all over the State, the AP has already started implementing the technology across 7,000 fair price shops in the State, which would be spread to 26,000 shops shortly. As per the guidelines of the Centre for Innovations in Public Systems (CIPS), the fair price shop dealer first logins into ePoS device with his biometric authentication.

He enters the card number of the beneficiary and the ePOS device displays ration card holder’s details with Aadhaar seeded details. If the ration card is not seeded with Aadhaar, the dealer has to perform seeding by collecting Aadhaar number from the citizen and later update the BFD (Best Finger Detection) status in ePoS.

The officials acknowledge that the ration card holder and dealers are facing problems in implementing the technology. But they rule out this as a brief starting problem, as the device is new to both consumers and dealers. “Since it is new to the people, there may be some problems. People have to cope up with them,” said District Supply Officer M K Rathod.

By:Md Nizamuddin

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