‘Fair price shops constitute the backbone of the food security system for the poor,’ Chidambram told Parliament in his Budget for 2004/05. ‘We shall address the weaknesses in the system and strengthen public distribution,’ he promised. ‘I shall return to this subject a little later.’ That was in para 15. You had to wait for 60 paragraphs to learn what Government would do on this vital matter. An idea has been suggested, he said – that Government should distribute food stamps to the poor, and the poor should be able to go to any designated shop and procure the food. And so, another pilot: ‘I propose to introduce a pilot scheme for distributing food stamps, instead of distributing food through fair price shops, in two or three contiguous districts in a selected state. I sincerely hope that one of the States will come forward to associate with the Central Government in this experiment.’

Three years later, the pilot had disappeared, but more managerial types had alighted. Chidambram has continued to feel the urgency of improving the public distribution system. And so in the Budget for 2007/08, he took the definitive step for improving them: ‘A Plan scheme for evaluation, monitoring, management and strengthening of the targeted PDS will be implemented in 2007-08, and this will include computerisation of the PDS and an integrated information system in the Food Corporation of India.’

Come this Budget, and Government has moved higher up the technology scale: not mere stamps, not mere computerization and integrated information systems, an all together new, and technologically more advanced pilot. ‘An idea that has been growing,’ Chidambram says in this year’s Budget, ‘is to deliver subsidies to the target group through smart cards. Finally, I have found two willing partners -- the State of Haryana and the Union Territory of Chandigarh. They will introduce, on a pilot basis, a smart card based delivery system to deliver food grains under the PDS in Haryana and Chandigarh, respectively…’

... contd.