One Nation One Ration Card shifts PDS from a location-bound to a beneficiary-centric model. Examine its impact on migrant food security and the challenges that remain.

Under the NFSA, 2013, a household could earlier draw its foodgrain entitlement only at its home Fair Price Shop (FPS). One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC), launched in 2019, makes the same card valid at any FPS across all 36 States/UTs [1]. The entitlement now follows the person, not the address. The gains for migrants are real but incomplete.

Impact on migrant food security

• Scale: over 233 crore portability transactions since inception have delivered more than 614 LMT of foodgrains [1].
• Both kinds of migration: portability works inter-State and intra-State, so it also helps people moving from village to city within a State [2].
• Digital backbone: 99.8% of FPSs have ePoS devices and 98.8% of cards are Aadhaar-seeded [1]. A central repository of NFSA beneficiaries allows cross-State checks and de-duplication [3].
• Ease of access: the Mera Ration app works in 13 languages and has a GPS-based FPS locator [1].

Challenges that remain

• Frozen coverage: NFSA coverage is tied to Census 2011. That caps it at about 81.35 crore people, and 80.6 crore are already identified [3]. A migrant without a card gains nothing from portability. The Supreme Court (2022) asked for a formula that is not limited by the 2011 Census [4].
• Biometric exclusion: a 2026 Standing Committee found that authentication fails for elderly persons and manual labourers, and flagged poor connectivity [5]. CAG found UIDAI had no system to analyse authentication failures [6].
• e-KYC gap: about 9% of beneficiaries are still not e-KYC verified [1], which is several crore people.
• Stock mismatch: FPS stocks are planned for local cardholders, so shops in cities with many migrants can run short. In 2021 a Standing Committee asked the government to identify migrant-heavy districts and supply them [7].
• Parallel systems: about 25 crore people on State-scheme cards are outside the NFSA database [4].

Way forward

• Revise coverage using current population data.
• Give every FPS a fallback for failed biometrics (OTP, iris or a recorded manual sale).
• Use SAKSHAM's real-time supply-chain tracking to send stock to migrant-heavy districts ahead of demand [1].

ONORC has made the ration card portable. The next step is to make the beneficiary list complete and the identity check forgiving. With updated coverage, biometric fallbacks and demand-led stocking, the beneficiary-centric model can deliver the right to food under Article 21 and SDG-2 (Zero Hunger) for every migrant.