THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The government's excuses for giving up rations without finding a permanent solution to the regular disruption of e-POS are wearing out the patience of merchants and cardholders. After the ration is stopped, the food minister will claim that the problem has been resolved. The server will crash again within days. This has become the norm.

After being closed for three days due to the e-POS malfunction, the ration shops were partially open yesterday. There was no major disruption in the morning, but by the evening, the e-POS encountered problems in most places. Cardholders had to put their finger on the machine multiple times. When it failed, they had to do OTP transaction.

In seven districts, the shops are open from morning to noon and the rest in the afternoon. From May 4th, when all the shops will work together, the e-POS may fail again.

Even when the e-POS is facing issues, the food department is making excuses. According to the Food Security Act, ration distribution is done through e-POS in all states. Hyderabad NIC is in charge of the server. In no other state is the ration disrupted due to e-POS malfunction.

The NIC informed the government that the e-POS issue this month was due to data migration related to the Aadhaar server in Hyderabad. The shops were closed as the NIC asked for two days to transfer the data on the server to cloud storage. Even when the data migration is claimed to be complete, things remain the same.

Server worth Rs 5 crores

First, the e-POS machine was on the IT cell's server. The last LDF government bought a new server at a cost of Rs 5 crore as the ration was frequently interrupted. Still it didn't go smoothly. Former food minister P Thilothaman and current minister GR Anil went to the National Informatics Centre in Hyderabad and held discussions several times but to no avail. On March 10, Minister GR Anil called a meeting of NIC, IT Mission, Keltron, C-DAC and BSNL representatives. Actions are planned to resolve the issues by April. April is almost over and the issue is still not resolved!

Failures of the food department

1. The 2017 software has not yet been upgraded to the new version

2. BSNL internet service is not even providing a bandwidth of 100 Mbps

3. SIM cards of mobile companies with good range are not inserted in the e-POS machine

4. The amount of food grains is not included in the message received on the phone while paying the bill