Govt launches online monitoring system for Food Corporation of India depots

The government today launched an online system to automate all operations of Food Corporation of India (FCI) depots, capturing data online on a real time basis, to bring total transparency in the working of FCI.

Launching the ''Online Depot System'' New Delhi today, minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution Ram Vilas Paswan said it would help in better monitoring and supervision to reduce leakages and losses of foodgrains.

The system will provide data regarding stock position, movement, quality and quantity on line. It will generate SMS alerts to depot officials, area manager and other decision making authorities.

All the data will be available on a dashboard also for top management to monitor centrally and help in automatic reconciliation and generating of MIS reports about foodgrain management.

Bringing depots online is a historic step towards improving functioning of FCI, Paswan said, adding that by July this year operations of all the FCI depots will be online and by March 2017 the remaining depots, which include CWC, SWC and hired ones will also be online.

Paswan said his ministry is in touch with the state governments also to bring operations of their procurement agencies and distribution network online so that from procurement to delivery of foodgrains to the fair price shop become online.

Highlighting recent initiatives to make the foodgrain management more efficient, Paswan said that almost 100 per cent cards have been digitised and about 80,000 fair price shops (FPS) have been provided with bio-metric `Point of Sale Device' for distributing subsidised foodgrains. Such devices will be installed at 3 lakh FPS by March 2017 and by March 2019 all the ration shops in the country will have these devices to make public distribution system totally leak proof.

He said 45 per cent ration cards have been seeded with a Aadhar cards and in next 2 years remaining cards will also be seeded with the Aadhars wherever available.

Paswan announced that all the labours working in FCI, including contact labours, will be given free uniform and masks. He said welfare of workers and labours is very high priority for his government.

FCI is engaged in procurement and storage of more than 60 million tonnes of wheat and rice and movement of 45 million tonnes of foodgrains across the country through almost 1,900 godowns.

`Depot Online' is an important project under Digital India initiative of the government.

Highlights of the Depot Online System:

• The system will automate/streamline all the activities during the stock inflow/outflow by road;
• Provide an efficient way to monitor and track the movement of items by rail;
• Godown operation such as dumping management, stack management, spillage management, stack suggestion, storage loss calculation etc will be automated while stock position/occupancy of the shed will be made available on real time basis;
• The application will integrate with the weighbridge installed within the depot;
• Track chemical spraying, fumigation and procurement quality check;
• Keep track of all the millers/agency that are associated with the depots - miller/agency will be able to log in into the system and enter required details;
• Provide a tracking of gunny, chemical and equipment, using technologies like RFID;
• Provide dash board for managerial staff along with basic MIS reports such as daily stock receipt, daily stock issue, quality related reports etc;
• Facilitate depot management for FCI, help in speeding up operations, free up manpower from laborious data collation and report preparation, thereby saving operational costs by proper planning & optimizing the administrative;
• Integrated view of end to end processes, use of workflow, notification and alerts and seamless connection between depots and district/regional offices of FCI;
• Capture data at source and in real time through handheld devices, reduce redundancy;
• Provide SMS alerts to help field staff take timely action; and
• Help save costs and prevent leakages.

`Depot Online' project is an important milestone in the overall modernisation of FCI and improvement of food supply chain.