Aadhaar-ration card linking: Car owners lose BPL cards

Linking the Aadhaar card with ration cards for the past few months has worked wonders for the food and civil supplies department, which has weeded out several bogus Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards.

Many BPL card holders in urban areas who own cars now find their cards automatically converted to the Above Poverty Line (APL) category, after their Aadhaar details revealed ownership of cars in the transport department data.

In a phone-in programme organised by Prajavani and DH on Saturday, food and civil supplies minister K Gopalaiah received several complaints on the loss of BPL card status. “By owning a car, any person with a BPL card will automatically lose it,” the minister clarified. “The car owners would have given their Aadhaar card details while buying the vehicle. Now, the same card is linked to the ration cards. Therefore, the moment someone owns a car, he automatically gets the APL card.”

The minister said the department was working on rebooting the Public Distribution System (PDS) to revive the golden past by supplying unadulterated, top quality edible oil and Mysore Sandal soap. “Due to the sudden outbreak of Covid-19, we had to keep that aside and work on the relief measures on a war footing. Otherwise, we were thinking of distributing quality consumer products to the public through the PDS system.”