Lubina Dua
Background
India has one of the world’s largest food security systems, yet for decades it was anchored to geography. Under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, subsidised food grains were distributed through the Public Distribution System (PDS) to eligible households, but only at the Fair Price Shop (FPS) where the ration card was originally registered. For the estimated 450 to 500 million internal migrants in India, this was not a minor inconvenience. It meant that a construction worker who moved from Odisha to Maharashtra for work either returned home to collect rations or lost access to food entitlements altogether during the months they were away.
The One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme was conceived to break this geographic lock. Implemented by the Department of Food and Public Distribution (DFPD) under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, ONORC enables any NFSA beneficiary to access their entitled food grains from any Fair Price Shop anywhere in India using their existing Aadhaar-linked ration card and biometric authentication.
The scheme was launched as a pilot in four states, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, on 9 August 2019. It was subsequently expanded across the country, with Assam becoming the 36th and final state to join in June 2022, making ONORC fully operational across all 36 states and Union Territories (Department of Food and Public Distribution, 2022).
ONORC sits within the broader policy architecture of the NFSA, 2013, which legally guarantees subsidised food grains to approximately 81.35 crore beneficiaries, roughly two-thirds of India’s population (Press Information Bureau, 2022). The scheme is technologically anchored to India’s digital public infrastructure: Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, electronic Point of Sale (ePoS) devices at FPS locations, and the Integrated Management of Public Distribution System (IM-PDS) portal.
Functioning
ONORC operates through a technology-driven architecture that enables real-time, nationwide portability of food entitlements. The process works as follows: a beneficiary visiting any FPS outside their home state presents their ration card or Aadhaar number and authenticates their identity through biometric verification on the ePoS device. The system verifies the beneficiary’s NFSA entitlement in real time through the IM-PDS portal and authorises the release of their entitled food grains at the national issue price, currently free of cost under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), which has been extended for five years from January 2024 (Press Information Bureau, 2024).
Three technological components underpin the system. First, Aadhaar seeding as of July 2022, 99% of the 19.5 crore ration cards issued under NFSA had been seeded with Aadhaar of at least one household member (Accountability Initiative, 2023). Second, ePoS device deployment, as of 2024, approximately 99.8% of the 5.43 lakh Fair Price Shops across India are automated with ePoS devices (Press Information Bureau, 2024). Third, the IM-PDS and Annavitran portals, which manage inter-state and intra-state portability transactions respectively, and generate real-time data on beneficiary transactions across the country.
To improve awareness and access among migrant populations, the DFPD launched the Mera Ration mobile application, available in 13 languages, which allows beneficiaries to locate the nearest FPS, check their entitlements, and verify their last transaction. A redesigned Mera Ration 2.0 app was subsequently introduced with additional features for migrant workers.
The scheme also underwent a significant policy evolution in January 2023, when the government made NFSA food grains free of cost under PMGKAY, replacing the earlier subsidised pricing of Rs. 3 per kg for rice and Rs. 2 per kg for wheat. This extension was formalised for five years starting in January 2024, covering all 81.35 crore NFSA beneficiaries, including those using ONORC portability (Press Information Bureau, 2024).
Performance
The scale of ONORC’s operations is significant. Since its inception in August 2019, more than 158.8 crore portability transactions have been recorded under the scheme, delivering over 315.8 lakh metric tonnes of food grains across all states and UTs (Press Information Bureau, 2024). In the first eleven months of 2024 alone, approximately 30 crore portability transactions were completed, delivering around 66 lakh metric tonnes of food grains (ClearTax, 2025). The scheme currently averages over 2.5 crore portability transactions per month.
Budgetary support for the scheme is channelled through the food subsidy head of the DFPD. For FY 2024-25, the DFPD was allocated Rs. 2.13 lakh crore, of which 96% was directed toward food subsidy, the largest single component of the Department’s budget (PRS Legislative Research, 2024).
The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be the scheme’s most critical stress test. During the period between April 2020 and September 2021, approximately 24.32 crore portability transactions were carried out across states and UTs, benefiting large numbers of NFSA beneficiaries, predominantly migrant workers, who were stranded far from their home states during lockdowns (Press Information Bureau, 2021). The entire ONORC reform was achieved at a cost of just Rs. 127 crore over four years, making it one of the most cost-efficient welfare delivery reforms in recent Indian policy history (Press Information Bureau, 2022).
However, one critical performance gap stands out. Despite the overall transaction volume, academic analysis has found that interstate portability, the feature most directly relevant to migrant workers, accounts for less than 1% of all ONORC transactions. PRS Legislative Research found that only 0.7% of nearly 100 crore transactions recorded up to 2024 were inter-state, while the remaining 99.3% were intra-state (PRS Legislative Research, 2024). This gap between the scheme’s design intent and its actual usage pattern is the most important analytical story of ONORC’s implementation.
Impact
ONORC’s most immediate and concrete impact has been on migrant workers’ food security during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time, millions of workers stranded in destination cities during the 2020 lockdowns were able to access their food entitlements without returning home. This was not a minor administrative convenience, for daily-wage workers who lost income overnight, access to free or subsidised food grains at local FPS shops was a critical survival mechanism.
The scheme has also had a meaningful impact on PDS governance. The introduction of Aadhaar-linked biometric authentication has reduced ghost beneficiaries and duplicate ration cards, improving the targeting efficiency of the food subsidy system. As of 2024, over 97% of PDS transactions are biometrically or Aadhaar-authenticated by states and UTs (Press Information Bureau, 2024), a significant shift from the pre-digitisation era when leakages in the PDS were estimated at 40-50% of food grains by the Economic Survey.
The gender dimension of ONORC is also worth noting. In many migrant households, women remain in the home state while male members migrate for work. The ability of the male migrant to access rations at the destination, while the family in the home state continues to draw rations there, directly improves household food security for women and children who would otherwise have lost access to a portion of the family’s food entitlement.
The Supreme Court of India has also played a role in mainstreaming ONORC, directing all states and UTs to implement the scheme by 31 July 2021 in the context of ensuring food security for migrant workers, giving the scheme judicial backing alongside executive authority.
Emerging Issues
1. The interstate portability gap. The most significant gap in ONORC is that it has largely functioned as an intrastate portability scheme rather than an interstate one. Only 0.7% of all transactions are inter-state, despite migrants being the primary intended beneficiaries (PRS Legislative Research, 2024). Ground-level studies have identified two key reasons: FPS dealers at destination states are reluctant to serve interstate migrants because stock allocation and subsidy reconciliation across states are complex and create financial uncertainty for local dealers (Tumbe and Jha, 2024).
Suggestion: The DFPD should introduce a dedicated interstate beneficiary quota at FPS locations in high-migration destination cities, with a streamlined central subsidy reconciliation mechanism that ensures FPS dealers are not financially penalised for serving interstate migrants.
2. Biometric authentication failures Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, while transformative in reducing leakages, has also excluded genuine beneficiaries. Elderly persons, manual labourers, and construction workers, populations with worn fingerprints, frequently fail biometric authentication, a problem colloquially described as “finger nahi kaam kiya” (the finger did not work) in field studies (Tumbe and Jha, 2024).
Suggestion: The Standing Committee on Food, Consumer and Public Distribution has already recommended that states not deny food grains to genuine households on grounds of biometric failure. This recommendation should be converted into a binding standard operating procedure, with iris scan and OTP-based authentication mandated as fallback options at all FPS locations.
3. Low awareness among migrant beneficiaries. Ground-level surveys have consistently found that a large proportion of migrant workers are unaware that they can use their ration card outside their home state (Tumbe and Jha, 2024). The Mera Ration app, while well-designed, assumes smartphone access and digital literacy that many migrant workers, particularly in construction, agriculture, and domestic work, do not have.
Suggestion: ONORC awareness must be integrated into existing migrant worker outreach systems, labour welfare boards, construction site inspections, and interstate bus terminal information kiosks. Toll-free helplines in regional languages, not just smartphone apps, are needed for last-mile awareness.
4. Exclusion of non-NFSA beneficiaries: ONORC’s portability benefits apply only to those already covered under the NFSA. However, the NFSA beneficiary list was frozen based on the 2011 Census, which means a large number of households that have become poor or vulnerable since 2011, including new migrant workers who do not have ration cards, remain entirely outside the system.
Suggestion: A time-bound revision of the NFSA beneficiary list using updated census and SECC data should be undertaken to include excluded vulnerable households, particularly urban migrants who lack both a home state ration card and a destination city address proof.
5. FPS dealer sustainability and stocking challenges: FPS dealers at high-migration destination cities face stocking challenges when large numbers of interstate migrants arrive during peak construction or harvest seasons. The current system does not adequately pre-position additional stock at FPS locations that serve high proportions of interstate migrants.
Suggestion: The DFPD should develop migration-season stock pre-positioning protocols using existing migration data from the Census, NSSO, and state labour departments to anticipate demand surges at FPS locations in destination districts.
Way Forward
ONORC is, at its core, a federalism success story. Getting 36 states and UTs, each with its own PDS architecture, political incentives, and administrative systems, to plug into a single national portability platform in under three years was no small achievement. The 158.8 crore transactions and 315.8 lakh metric tonnes of food grains delivered through portability are real numbers representing real meals for real people (Press Information Bureau, 2024).
Yet the scheme has not fulfilled its foundational promise: ensuring that the migrant worker building a highway in Gujarat can eat as securely as they would at home in Bihar. The 0.7% interstate transaction share is not a minor footnote; it is a signal that the architecture, however technically sound, has not overcome the ground-level frictions of dealer reluctance, low awareness, and biometric failure that stand between a migrant and their entitlement. The next chapter for ONORC is not about connectivity, which is largely built, but about usability. The reforms below are sequenced by how quickly they can be implemented and how directly they close the interstate gap.
The most immediate priority, and the one requiring the least fiscal outlay, is to widen authentication options at the point of sale. Biometric failure, whether from fingerprints worn down by manual labour, weak connectivity, or ageing devices, is the most common reason a portable transaction collapses at the counter. The enabling tools, including OTP-based and Aadhaar-linked face authentication, already exist, so the task is largely one of policy directive and device readiness rather than fresh investment.
Pairing this with offline awareness, taking the message directly into construction sites, brick kilns, and domestic worker colonies through labour departments, contractors, and civil society partners, forms a second low-cost, fast-to-deploy measure. Together, these attack the point-of-sale and demand-side barriers that suppress interstate use, and both can begin within the current financial year.
The second tier addresses the supply side. It requires administrative and fiscal coordination but no new infrastructure. FPS dealers currently have little reason to welcome a migrant customer whose transaction may be slower, riskier, or less remunerative than their regular clientele. A portability-linked commission or handling bonus would turn that migrant from a cost into an incentive, and can be introduced through revised state commission structures.
The most structural reform, and therefore the slowest, is pre-positioning stocks along established migration corridors. This depends on mapping migration flows and coordinating FCI and state allocation logistics, making it a medium-term goal rather than a quick win, though it becomes essential to sustaining portability once usage rises.
India has built the infrastructure for portable food security. The immediate task is narrower and more achievable than it may appear: fix authentication and awareness now, realign dealer incentives next, and build corridor-level stock planning over time. The sequence matters because the first steps cost little, can start immediately, and target the exact frictions that the 0.7% figure exposes.
About the Contributor
Lubina Dua is a Research Intern at IMPRI. An Optometry graduate with a strong interest in health policy and governance, she has represented India at the Harvard Conference on Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) and participated in the World Bank Youth Summit. Her research interests lie in health governance, digital health policy, and public welfare.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgement
The author extends sincere thanks to the IMPRI team for their guidance.
She also extends her sincere thanks to Paridhi Passi and Asmatwali for their valuable feedback, useful suggestions, and support in shaping this article.
This article was posted by Yashkirti Pal, a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI.
