Remote Data Centre

Press Room

Thursday | October 29, 2009

Friday | October 02, 2009 | E-Paper

SMS facility enhances working of PDS

Chennai: Civil supplies officials commenting on the introduction of the SMS facility, says it has improved the functioning of the system. By going through the data every morning, officials in-charge of each district categorise the stock position into three kinds — ‘stock out’, ‘critical’ and ‘comfortable’.

   The ration shops which have run out of stocks are immediately replenished after which shops categorised as ‘critical’ are attended to. The information network involving the godowns and co-operative societies have also improved, officials said.

    As on August 31, Tamil Nadu has 1.69 crore green cards where consumers can buy rice at one rupee per kg, 11.1 lakh white cards with sugar entitlements, 61,000 white cards with no entitlement at all and 62,000 khaki cards meant for police personnel.

Friday | October 02, 2009 | E-Paper

Thursday | July 31, 2009 | E-Paper

PDS stock availability can be checked on the net
N. Anand

CHENNAI: Cardholders in Chennai will soon be able to buy essential commodities such as rice, sugar or wheat from the Public Distribution System (PDS) shops at their convenience by logging on to the department’s website to know the stock position.

This is likely to become a reality within a month’s time as the Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection Department website would give details about the exact quantity of essential commodities available in each PDS shops on a day-to-day basis. For the last few days, only the officers are being allowed to access the information to keep track of stock movement.

“The idea is to eliminate manual compiling of data that is becoming impossible. As a first step, we have linked all the 62 PDS shops in Anna Nagar to the Remote Data Centre in Hyderabad with the help of handheld billing machine. In Chennai city alone, we have around 900 PDS shops and it would take nearly a year to cover them,” Registrar of Co-operative Societies, Jatindra Nath Swain told The Hindu.

SMS help

To keep pace with the technology, Mr. Swain has instructed the officers in the remaining PDS shops to send in the daily stock position of 13 essential commodities such as rice, wheat, sugar, palmolein, atta, rava, maida, masala packets, urad dal and toor dal through SMS to Remote Data Centre, for which they are being given Rs.50 per month per user.

“It is only a pilot programme. It will go on till we get the handheld billing machine installed in all the PDS shops. Almost all the officers in Chennai have been given training. Right now, we expect that errors to be in the region of 15 to 20 per cent. We can also track how many of them have followed our instructions and explanation will be sought from defaulters. The supplies will be sent to the PDS shops depending upon the stock level such as comfortable, critical or zero level,” he added.

Mr. Swain said that the roll out of handheld billing machine would take more than a year, since none of the manufacturers had the capacity to supply more than 1,000 units per month.

“We require around 22,000 units for the entire State. Till then, we will be using the SMS mode to know the shifting of stock from godowns to PDS shops and availability of it at the retail end. Shortly, we will introduce this system in Villupuram and Tiruvannamalai districts,” he added.

The Hindu.

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