The Central Government is planning to roll out a pilot programme next month focusing on a limited number of people using a ‘digital food currency’ under the free ration scheme in Chandigarh, Puducherry, and three districts in Gujarat, as per a Times of India (TOI) report.
To explain, beneficiaries will receive digital food coupons on a monthly basis in a digital wallet enabled by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Consequently, people can visit ration distribution shops, scan the shop owner’s QR code, and redeem these coupons to receive their free foodgrains quota. Importantly, the government will set a time limit for using these digital food coupons to address the issue of accumulation.
This initiative is reportedly aimed at bringing in a higher level of transparency, addressing issues linked to leakages, and relieving ration card holders of the hassles that accompany biometric authentication.
Earlier this month, the Gujarat government collaborated with the Centre and the RBI to initiate a soft launch of this pilot project in Ahmedabad. As per the official statement, it received positive feedback from beneficiaries as well as fair price (FP) shop operators.
Will This Initiative Solve Biometric Authentication Hassles?
People TOI spoke to remarked that the pilot aims to demonstrate its feasibility, functionality, and practical potential on a small scale.
Officials also say that digital food coupons will ensure beneficiaries use the foodgrains subsidy exclusively for buying from local ration shops, rather than using the subsidy amount for other unrelated purposes.
Pertinently, another aim of this initiative is to solve the issue of biometric authentication hassles for ration card holders, given that India has witnessed snags related to this aspect of foodgrains distribution.
In Focus: The Biometric Authentication Menace At Ration Shops
For instance, ration card holders in Telangana were facing problems related to biometric authentication at FP shops as recently as June 2025. Several beneficiaries filed complaints regarding frequent failures in fingerprint recognition.
“These technical issues have led to delays in ration distribution and long waiting times at ration shops,” a ration beneficiary explained at the time. Meanwhile, some ration card holders mentioned that inadequate software infrastructure had hindered smooth implementation, despite the early announcement of the ration plan in Telangana.
Elsewhere, the Delhi Government had to change ration collection rules back in 2021 to address biometric hardware failures at ration distribution shops. At the time, Hindustan Times (HT) reported that the Delhi Government allowed beneficiaries who could not authenticate their biometrics to nominate others to collect rations on their behalf.
The biometric authentication failure in the Delhi instance had to do with beneficiaries being unable to authenticate their thumbprint or iris at ration distribution…
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