Technology fished out 10 million fake ration cards in Maharashtra: CM Devendra Fadnavis

Maharashtra has found as many as 10 million fake ration cards using technology tools, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said Wednesday.

He also announced the new model request for proposal (RFP) while tendering out IT contracts, developed by industry lobby Nasscom and the Union ministry of electronics and IT.

"The public distribution system (PDS) has changed through technology initiatives. With all the digital initiatives, we have actually found out 10 million fake ration cards," Fadnavis told the annual Nasscom leadership forum here.

The Western state, having a population of over 11 crore, is using technology across all spheres to drive efficiency and for better allocation of resources, he said.

Technological tools have taken down malnutrition related deaths to zero in Harisal village of Amravati district, Fadnavis said.

On the industry's long-standing demand of tender contracts structuring, Fadnavis announced that the model RFP will be adopted in two months by the state.

It can be noted that the IT industry has had concerns regarding selection of bidders and payments for IT contracts. The industry says an IT contract is different from other works and the government cannot insist on aspects like lowest bidder and also payments only at the end of the work.

Fadnavis said 55 million transactions have happened using the state government's citizens portal, Aaple Sarkar, which has benefitted one million citizens.

He said a special CM's dashboard has been created to monitor all the projects and schemes centrally, and added that the war room on infra projects also uses a lot of technology to monitor progress.

The government demand for paper is also coming down and has halved over the last few years, the chief minister said, adding that the broad objective is to be paperless in future.

Fadnavis said technology will help bring equity in the society through democratisation, and will be used more aggressively as the government goes about meeting its social sector goals.

He said the state is targeting to be a USD 1 trillion economy by 2025 from the present USD 400 billion.

The services sector will have to grow at 15.5 per cent, industry at 13 per cent and agriculture at 6 per cent to achieve this target, he said, inviting the tech industry to set up base in the state.

Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh said the domestic IT industry has become a USD 180 billion behemoth, employing four million people directly and serving 75 perc ent of the Fortune 500 companies.

She said four global sourcing centres got added in 2018, taking the total number of such centres to 1,000.

The challenges before the IT industry are trust, governance, maintaining a balance between privacy and innovation, and the huge talent crisis, she said.

-PTI