Portability without expansion: How platform design reorders India’s food security federalism
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When the One Nation One Ration Card system was launched in August 2019, it was presented as a solution to migrants being excluded from a welfare regime that was territorially anchored.
Under the traditional Public Distribution System, which provides subsidised rice, wheat and other food items to low-income households, beneficiaries could collect their monthly ration only from a single Fair Price Shop in their home district.
For India’s estimated 140 million short-term internal migrants who move seasonally for work, this often meant losing access to food entitlements while away from home.
One Nation One Ration Card promised to address this by allowing beneficiaries to draw rations from any Fair Price Shop anywhere in the country using biometric authentication. But five years into the programme being rolled out across India, inter-state portability remains sharply uneven.
Significant volumes of grain being bought through inter-state portability facilities are concentrated along a few corridors, while states with large migrant inflows and historically expansive Public Distribution Systems record negligible uptake.
These patterns are often attributed to implementation failures – low awareness about the programme, dealer resistance, biometric errors or problems with network connectivity.
Yet implementation gaps alone cannot explain the striking concentration of inter-state portability. Delhi, for instance, processes roughly 3.7 million inter-state portability transactions annually –...