Bhubaneswar: The Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Minister Ranendra Pratap Swain Wednesday told the Assembly that the state government has planned to introduce iris scan for availing subsidised foods in doubtful cases.
The minister announced the move after cases of mismatching of thumb impressions came to fore from different corners of the state, mainly in cases of labourers. The minister said that in cases of mismatch of thumb impressions during disbursement of food under the Food Security Act (FSA), the state will use iris scan.
“In such cases, we will be relaxing the norms which mandate use of thumb impression for verifying the authenticity of beneficiaries for giving their due as per the Food Security Act. We will use iris scan of the beneficiaries to match the biometric details of the citizens,” Swain told the House.
Swain accepted the fact that sometimes there had been cases where the biometric machines failed to match the fingerprints of the beneficiaries of the registered citizens under the Act.
Earlier, the Congress party had raised the issue of plight of several labourers who face issues with matching their fingerprints with the biometric machines to avail their quota of ration.
“Many FSA beneficiaries are labourers. Due to their prolonged manual work round the clock, they lose their fingerprints. Many of these labourers thus get deprived of their entitlements under the Act as their fingerprints fail to match the data of the biometric machines. There should be some alternative,” Congress legislator Tara Prasad Bahinipati said.