Hyderabad, May 13: Chief Minister K Rosaiah today directed officials of the civil supplies department to verify the requests for 7.61 lakh new ration cards and make arrangements for issuing them by August 15. He wanted the officials to notify the entire process of issuing new ration cards immediately apart from setting up the `Iris testing and processing’ centres at all mandal headquarters.
During the drive for removal of ineligible ration cards, civil supplies department officials discovered about 19.09 lakh duplicate or ineligible cards. From 5.8 crore Iris biometric database during the de-duplication drive, the officials found that 4.7 crores were unique and genuine. Officials said efforts were on for online applications to prevent duplicate applications in future.
The officials claimed that the prices of rice were showing a downward trend. While the prices of red gram and black gram were falling, the price of green gram has gone up. The prices of sunflower oil, palm oil and chillis have gone down this month but the prices of groundnut oil and tamarind are going up.
They informed Rosaiah that the prices of sugar and onion were also declining slowly.
–Agencies