Among the states that have dramatically improved their performance in this respect, one state that stands out is Bihar. A former laggard in this respect, Bihar was the state with the highest leakage and lowest percentage of population accessing PDS has shown a surprising turnaround. Per person consumption of PDS cereals in Bihar was 0.66kg in 2009-10 as against the national average of 1.8kg per person. By 2011-12, per capita consumption of rice and wheat from PDS increased to 2.2kg per person, marginally higher than 2.1kg per person nationally. What about leakages? As against 65% leakage in PDS in 2009-10, Bihar has managed to reduce leakage in 2011-12 to only 12%.

While most states including traditional laggards such as West Bengal and Jharkhand have shown improvement in the functioning of PDS, there is one state which needs to be mentioned for deterioration in performance of PDS.

The state which turns out to be the worst performer as far as functioning of PDS is concerned is Gujarat. Not only has the percentage of population purchasing from PDS declined from 26% in 2009-10 to 22% in 2011-12, the average consumption from PDS per person has also declined from 0.8kg per person to 0.6kg per person. But the worst aspect of PDS performance in Gujarat is the fact that it is now the state with the highest leakage in PDS in 2011-12: The figure rising from 45% in 2009-10 to 69% in 2011-12. Among big states, Gujarat had the highest leakage in 2011-12. Read More

Jyothi Shankaran

    Jyothi’s last role was as Senior Editor with the business news channel Bloomberg TV India. He also worked as News Editor at business-standard.com, the online version of the business newspaper Business Standard. Jyothi is a chemical engineer from the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar.