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UPSC 2022 GS-III · 10 marks · 150 words

What are the major challenges of Public Distribution System (PDS) in India? How can it be made effective and transparent?

What “Examine” demands

investigate the issue closely — how it arose, how it works, what it achieves and where it falls short — looking at both sides.

The characteristic failure: description of what the thing is, with no probing of how well it works.

What a top answer must contain

These are the checkable specifics from the marking standard for this question — the actual case, committee, datum or thinker, not an instruction to “give examples”.

  • Challenges: inclusion-exclusion errors, leakage (Shanta Kumar ~40% estimate), cereal-heavy nutrition, storage losses, subsidy burden
  • Done: NFSA coverage, ePoS + Aadhaar, One Nation One Ration Card portability for migrants
  • Further: DBT where markets function (Chandigarh pilot), millets diversification, FCI reform, community monitoring (Chhattisgarh model), social audits
  • Guardrail: authentication-failure exclusions — technology with manual fallback, rights not conditional on biometrics

The band thresholds and the pre-scored sample answers behind this standard stay private — they are the calibration your copy is placed against.

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