MARGAO
Ration cards collection is giving sleepless nights to many people of Salcete as mistakes have cropped up in the cards and many card holders are forced to make corrections. The government has terminated the contract of Goa Electronics Ltd (GEL) which was earlier doing data entry.
While names are wrongly spelled in some cards, others continue to carry dead persons’ names besides omission and addition of names has been done in some new ration cards that were distributed by the government.
People continue to queue up at the Salcete mamlatdar office every passing day to collect ration cards from the civil supplies office. In Salcete, there are 65,000-odd ration card holders including people who are availing benefits under the food security act. Many elderly couples are forced to run from pillar to post to collect new ration cards and then also made to suffer due to wrong entries.
Sources informed that the government had initially outsourced the work of data entry to GEL but due to financial crunch, it was stopped. An angry senior citizen said, “We face a lot of inconvenience as we are made to visit the office umpteen times to collect the ration cards and then make corrections. Climbing up the stairs is difficult.”
Director of civil supplies department could not be contacted since he is on leave. A source in the department informed that the outsourcing of data entry work was stopped since the department could not afford to pay GEL. However, he also said the ration card holders should cooperate with the civil supplies officials since it is a first attempt post-liberation to digitalise cards.