The new deal announced by Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday for migrant labourers is unlikely to result in any immediate grains for such workers from Bengal, said a senior state food and supplies department official referring to the problems in implementing the measures that the Union finance minister had announced.
Sitharaman said the Centre would spend Rs 3,500 crore to give 5kg of rice and 1kg of chickpeas for the families of 8 crore migrant labourer to assuage the woes of the worst-affected section during the lockdown.
“The scheme sounds nice on paper, but it would hardly benefit lakhs of migrant workers from Bengal, who are stuck in different states or came back recently,” said a source.
Although the scheme details are yet to reach states, sources said its broad outline mentioned that One Nation One Ration Card would be used to ensure food grains to the migrant workers wherever they were stuck.
“But the problem is that the scheme is yet to take a final shape as the Centre did not make it mandatory to upload details of ration cards to the central server. In Bengal, we have initiated the ground work, but the lockdown hit the progress of our project,” said a senior government official.
Out of 9.95 crore ration card holders in the state, the government has already seeded Aadhaar cards with more than 6.5 crore ration cards. Once all the ration cards are seeded with Aadhaar, the data would be shared with a central server.
This would allow the process of accessing details of a ration card holder from any of the states.
As the Centre announced chickpeas along with rice under the new scheme, the migrants from Bengal may not get the benefit, sources said.
“People from the state used to have lentil or moong with rice. People of Bengal are not fond of chickpeas. So, we don’t know whether they will pick up the allotted items,” said another official.
Another official said it was still not clear whether migrants stuck in other states would get the ration immediately in the respective states.