Bhubaneswar: The Odisha government has deleted the names of more than one lakh ineligible beneficiaries from the ration card list, Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Minister Krushna Chandra Patra informed the State Assembly on Wednesday.

Replying to a question by MLA Tankadhar Tripathy, the minister said that under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana and the State Food Security Scheme, around 97.40 lakh families comprising 3.25 crore people are receiving free food grains.

As part of ongoing verification, 30,125 ineligible ration cards with 1,09,853 members have been identified and removed. Similarly, the names of 6,38,996 deceased persons have also been deleted from the database. The deletions have created scope for including eligible new applicants in the system.

Patra informed that 2,05,384 new families (3,87,819 members) have so far been included in the food security schemes after the exclusion of the ineligible beneficiaries. Currently, 5,09,606 fresh applications are under field verification across the state. 

The minister further said that the government has adopted 10 exclusion criteria to detect ineligible ration card holders by matching ration card details with other departmental databases. Names of deceased persons identified during e-KYC verification are also being immediately removed to keep the database clean and updated, he said.