CHENNAI: Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Friday ordered extension of the validity of the existing ration cards by an year, i.e., till the end of the year 2012 as the State government had proposed to provide biometric based smart family cards to all. The move is aimed at eliminating bogus ration cards and ending irregularities in ration shops.The validity of the existing family cards is coming to end on December 31.As family cards are now being issued without any unique mechanism to identify duplication of members in more than one place, there are registration of members in family cards in more than one place, which results in duplication of members as well as issue of bogus ration cards.Further, in fair price shops, bogus bills are said to be prepared under family cards not brought to fair price shops for purchase of commodity. With a view to eliminating this serious problem, it has been proposed to replace the existing family cards in circulation by bio-metric based smart family cards.The director of census operations under the National Population Registry is conducting bio-metric capturing of 10 finger prints and Internal Resource Information System (Iris) of citizens to issue unique identification number.After completion of this process of bio-metric capturing, the data will be adopted for issue of bio-metric smart family cards. The advantage is that since the data will be subjected to de-duplication, duplication of members and bogus cards will be eliminated.Further, in fair price shops, bills can be drawn only if the cards are physically brought to the shop and hence, bogus billing will also be eliminated. The government has proposed to issue biometric smart family cards during the year 2012-2013, by replacing the existing ones.
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