gov talk
ASHANK DESAI FOUNDER, MASTEK
“Old monitoring ways won’t do” We need a dashboard-based approach to monitor and ensure the health of our public distribution system
T
he public distribution system in India plays an important role in providing food security for those who need it most. Millions of poor families depend on the PDS for their daily ration of necessities. India has been grappling with the size, spread and logistical complexity of the PDS for years now. Information technology can transform the PDS. It can improve efficiency of the supply chain and make processes transparent; it can reduce leakage and improve delivery throughput, and most importantly, it can ensure that the right people get the right goods at the right time. But there are challenges… In the Food and Civil supplies department, how would a senior official, say at the secretary level, check the health of PDS? What parameters will he use to monitor it? Traditionally, the monitoring would be done using parameters such as the number of BPL cards and fair price shops (FPS), and the distribution numbers.
But will these numbers tell him how healthy the PDS is? Officials typically have PDS data pouring in from hundreds of offices, and on its own, the data tells them nothing about the health of such a huge distribution network and operation. Take the analogy of a routine health checkup, one that involves blood tests, chest X-rays and other such tests… Do the tests in isolation tell how healthy one is? No. One needs a doctor who looks at them holistically to get a complete picture of one’s health. It’s the same with the PDS. Instead of looking at different numbers in isolation, what if the officials had dashboards that gave them one view of the health of the PDS and also of the FCS. Sounds great? But how is all this data going to end up on those dashboards, and offer insights on the health of the PDS? Ok, let’s break down the PDS into some components. First, we have the beneficiaries, who are identified by fair price shops
through a ration card. Then there is the entire food distribution network at the end of which is the fair price shop (FPS), and finally there is a team that does budgeting and allocation. In the current scenario, when a beneficiary walks into an FPS and buys a kilo of rice, no one in the distribution system other than the FPS knows that such a transaction has happened. Suppose, there was a way that the budgeting and allocation team could track transactions as they happened. Imagine the impact of such a capability on the efficiency of the supply chain! Next, one would want to know if the targets were being met, i.e. the sales record should ideally show that 100 percent of BPL families have received the benefit. To get that, the dashboard could simply calculate the ratio of BPL families in the beneficiary database to the number of BPL families in the sales database. What will make all of this possible? Well, only a well integrated end-toend solution that encompasses the value chain right from budgeting to logistics to beneficiary management.
must Read Unlocking E-Government Potential Author: Subhash Bhatnagar Publisher: Sage Publication Price: INR 450/-
September 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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