One Nation one Ration card

A nation’s ration card plan and the distribution of free food grains, the two measures announced by the Center as a panacea for millions of migrants facing hunger and homelessness during the Covid-19 shutdown, appear to have failed. Data presented by government officials to a standing committee of Parliament suggests that there is a large gap between the planned coverage of the plans and the actual beneficiaries on the ground.

One Nation One Ration Card – Turtle-Paced Deployment

As of July 2020, only 2,000 interstate transactions were made through the ePoS mechanism. That means one nation’s ration card scheme benefited just 13,000 migrants. The total food grains distributed through the scheme was just 31,500 kg.
These details were provided by Food Department officials during a statement to the Parliamentary Labor Commission earlier this week.

Compared to the government’s claims that 24 states and 90 percent of the ration shops are already integrated into the scheme, 31,500 kg of food grains accessed is terrible.

There are a total of 5.35 lakh fair price stores in India catering to Rs 23 crore ration card holders in the country. In the last three months, the second wave of migration is taking place as migrant workers slowly return to their workplace. And a nation’s ration card scheme is ideally positioned to solve the problems they face.

Yet the Department of Food and Public Distribution in its July 2020 monthly report has practically admitted that one nation’s ration card scheme, one is struggling to make an impact.

Paragraph 3 of the department’s July report highlights that “under the PDS reforms, a total of 4.88 lakh (90.4 percent) Fair Price Stores (FPS) has been automated through the installation of electronic Point of Sale (ePoS) devices. ) “.

The monthly report adds that the national/interstate portability facility under a one-nation ration card plan was enabled in four other states / UT: Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, and Uttarakhand, August 2020 distribution month.

While the department claims that with the integration of these four States, a total of 24 States / UTs are now seamlessly integrated into a single national portability group, the last line of paragraph 3 reads: “However, the number of transactions remains low due to Covid-19 related reasons. “

July 2020 Department of Food and Public Distribution Report

PDS store owners say the ePoS system does not work in remote areas due to connectivity issues.

The ePoS facility is key to a nation’s ration card scheme. This allows ration cardholders the freedom to extract food grains under the PDS scheme anywhere in India instead of being restricted to where the card is registered.

The one-nation ration card scheme, launched on June 1, 2020, plans to cover the entire country by March 31, 2021. However, the established mechanism has not provided access to the migrant workforce in most places.

Free food grains scheme: States fail to deliver

The free food grains scheme meant to be an instant remedy for migrants, who were left jobless and homeless due to the COVID crisis, did not reach them. Under the AtmaNirbhar Bharat (ANB) Program, the Center had allocated 8 lakh metric tons of food grains. The free grain was supposed to be distributed to approximately 8 million migrants across the country by the respective state governments and the Center was to pick up the bill.

Of the 8 metric lakh tons, nearly 80 percent or 6.39 metric lakh tons reached the states. But by August 5, a scant 2.46 lakh metric tons had been distributed among migrants who, faced with hunger, had started walking hundreds of kilometers to their places of origin. This equates to roughly 31 percent of the food grains received by the states and 39 percent of the grains allocated by the Center.

Of the total 8 million intended beneficiaries, only 2.5 million gained access to free food grains to survive. That means the states failed about 5.5 crores of migrants and this explains the desperation that forced the migrants to march back home.

The crisis faced by migrants can be understood by the fact that there are 81 million people covered by the National Food Security Plan and a large majority of them are poor, but only 8 million million were identified as specific beneficiaries. By comparison, experts believe that nearly 30 percent of Indians faced severe hardship during the running of the bulls in India.

Obstacle in implementing a nation’s ration card plan

The NDA’s ambitious government ration card program is poised to lose national coverage before the March 2021 deadline.

For the scheme to be operational, the beneficiaries of the public distribution system (PDS) must link their ration card with Aadhaar. In the meantime, the government should enable biometric verification at fair-price stores across the country. Once this is done, the ration cards will become portable and can be used by cardholders at any PDS store nationwide after biometric verification.

The biggest obstacle to the scheme is poor connectivity issues. While the government claims that most regions of the country now have a data link PDS store, the owners say their ePoS machines are down and they have to write down the details manually as without the internet they can’t do the verification biometric.

The second obstacle is the opposition of states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, and the complete lack of unanimity.

While TMC’s government in Bengal has announced free rations until May next year, Odisha wants a nation’s ration card to be hybrid in nature that covers areas where the PDS network is poor. Chhattisgarh does not want to integrate, as it already has a robust PDS system that provides food grains to the weaker sections.

Government officials claim that food grain distribution is also a political issue and that each state wants its own scheme rather than being integrated into a single central scheme.

Coronavirus in Hyderabad

CCMB Hyderabad: Another new thing has come to light regarding the coronavirus. The virus is also found in the feces of people infected with corona.

coronavirus in sewage water:
Extensive research is underway on how the coronavirus spreads. New things are coming to light day by day in research. So far, researchers have identified how the coronavirus spreads from one person to another. The researchers also say that cats should be included in any precautionary measures against the virus. Scientists at the Hyderabad Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology.

Until now it was known that the coronavirus is transmitted to other people through droplets when coughing or sneezing. The coronavirus is transmitted when a patient touches or touches objects that have been used. However, CCMB researchers have recently discovered that the virus can be transmitted through feces rather than through the nose and mouth. CCMB and IICT have conducted a joint investigation to find traces of the coronavirus in wastewater. Sewage samples were examined for signs of coronavirus. A joint study by CCMB and IICT found that the virus remained in the patient’s body for up to 35 days after infection.

Scientists say the virus has been released in nearly 2 lakh of excreta in Hyderabad. However, the presence of the virus was detected in the sewage but it was not transmitted to anyone else. These details were revealed in research conducted by CSIR, IICT, and other organizations in collaboration with CCMB. Eighty percent of wastewater treatment plants are found to have virus residues. The research was conducted by scientists Uday Kiran and Kuncha Santosh Kumar, led by CMB Director Rakesh Mishra and IICT scientists Manupati Hemalata, Harish Shankar, and Venkata Mohan.

On the other hand, a joint CCMB-CSIR study found that nearly 6 lakh of people in Hyderabad city was infected with corona. Most of them don’t have corona symptoms and don’t even need to go to the hospital.

Facebook A new update for Instagram

Facebook starts Merger of Instagram: A new update for Instagram seems to suggest that Facebook has started merging the app’s chats with its Facebook Messenger service.

Facebook seems to possess flipped the switch to integrate the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger. On Friday night, various editors of The Verge across the country, on both iOS and Android devices, noted that an update screen appeared on the Instagram mobile app with the message “There’s a replacement thanks to message on Instagram.” with an inventory of features including a “new colorful search for your chats”, “Facebook is the Most Useful chatbox with friends ” more emoji reactions, swipe to reply.

The new update appears to exchange the Instagram DM icon with a replacement Facebook Messenger logo, and more colorful chats are now offered within the app. consistent with the report, you continue to can’t send messages to Facebook users from Instagram, but this move does signal the beginning of Facebook’s previously promoted plans to enable cross-platform messaging on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

In a report last year,

Facebook announced that it had been creating deeper integrations to enable better integration, but that its three messaging services would still function as separate applications. From that report:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing an idea to make new backend integrations for the company’s Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp apps. According to a replacement report from The Newyork Times.

To be clear, Facebook won’t take these services and merge them into a replacement one. they’re going to all still function as standalone apps on your phone, but technical changes are going to be made behind the scenes in order that they can work more seamlessly with one another.

The Verge didn’t specify exactly where this new update was released, it appears to be “nationwide” within the US.