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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?

भारत में सार्वजनिक वितरण प्रणाली (पी.डी.एस.) की प्रमुख चुनौतियाँ क्या हैं? इसे किस प्रकार प्रभावी तथा पारदर्शी बनाया जा सकता है?

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

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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

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