Portability without expansion: How platform design reorders India’s food security federalism

When the One Nation One Ration Card system was launched in August 2019, it was presented as a solution to migrants being excluded from a welfare regime that was territorially anchored.

Under the traditional Public Distribution System, which provides subsidised rice, wheat and other food items to low-income households, beneficiaries could collect their monthly ration only from a single Fair Price Shop in their home district.

For India’s estimated 140 million short-term internal migrants who move seasonally for work, this often meant losing access to food entitlements while away from home.

One Nation One Ration Card promised to address this by allowing beneficiaries to draw rations from any Fair Price Shop anywhere in the country using biometric authentication. But five years into the programme being rolled out across India, inter-state portability remains sharply uneven.

Significant volumes of grain being bought through inter-state portability facilities are concentrated along a few corridors, while states with large migrant inflows and historically expansive Public Distribution Systems record negligible uptake.

These patterns are often attributed to implementation failures – low awareness about the programme, dealer resistance, biometric errors or problems with network connectivity.

Yet implementation gaps alone cannot explain the striking concentration of inter-state portability. Delhi, for instance, processes roughly 3.7 million inter-state portability transactions annually – nearly 70% of the national total. But this translates to only about 310,000 beneficiaries accessing grain each month out of Delhi’s estimated migrant population of 8 million-9 million: barely 4% coverage.

These persistent gaps point to a deeper explanation rooted in the institutional architecture of the One Nation One Ration Card programme.

The architecture

Three interlinked design features shape how portability actually functions.

First, the frozen eligibility base.

The National Food Security Act, passed in 2013 after prolonged Supreme Court litigation on hunger and starvation despite the country’s surplus food stocks, converted food security from discretionary welfare into a legal right. It entitled beneficiaries to 5 kg of subsidised grain per person per month, guaranteeing coverage to 75% of the rural population and 50% of urban dwellers. The number of beneficiaries was intended to be in line with “the latest published figure of the Census”.

This principle was narrowed decisively through the Targeted Public Distribution System Control Order issued in 2015. The order fixed state-wise beneficiary ceilings to population figures derived from the 2011 census. It interpreted the National Food Security Act as referring specifically – and indefinitely – to that census alone until a new one was conducted.

National coverage was thus capped at 81.35 crore beneficiaries. Subsequent population growth – estimated at over 150 million people – was never incorporated. A dynamic, rights-based entitlement was converted into a static quota through executive rule-making.

From state innovation to centralised discipline

Before 2015, India’s Public Distribution System landscape was marked by substantial state-level diversity, explicitly endorsed by Supreme Court orders in the Right to Food case.

Tamil Nadu had operated near-universal Public Distribution System coverage since the late 1960s. Chhattisgarh’s reforms from 2004 demonstrated that even poorer states could dramatically improve delivery.

Similarly, Kerala and Karnataka expanded coverage well beyond central allocations using state resources and discretionary grain supplies.

The 2015 Targeted Public Distribution System Control Order began to constrain this diversity. Beyond freezing state-wise beneficiary ceilings, it mandated uniform technological standards – biometric authentication for every transaction, centralised data repositories managed by the National Informatics Centre and real-time reporting.

States retained the responsibility for implementation and costs but lost control over coverage decisions. Those that expanded coverage could continue to do so only at their own expense, now under centralised technical surveillance.

By this point, three broad categories of states had emerged: states operating strictly within central quotas (such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar); states relying on discretionary “tide-over” allocations from the Centre to extend coverage (such as Kerala); and states financing expanded coverage from their own budgets (such as Tamil Nadu and Karnataka).

IM-PDS and the completion of the architecture

By 2018, the Central government’s Integrated Management of Public Distribution System platform had operationalised this architecture, providing real-time visibility into transactions at over half-a-million Fair Price Shops nationwide. The platform prioritised continuous deduplication - the process of identifying and removing duplicate or allegedly ineligible records - and identification of “inactive” or “suspicious” ration cards.

Between 2020 and 2024, several million cards were flagged or deleted, disproportionately in high out-migration states – the very populations One Nation One Ration Card claims to serve.

When inter-state portability was made mandatory through National Food Security Act amendments in 2024, this discipline was complete. A uniform technological system now operated across a highly differentiated state-wise terrain, with effects that varied systematically by state category.

Second, the deduction principle.

One Nation One Ration Card operates on a zero-sum basis: when beneficiaries draw rations outside their home state, the grain is deducted from the current home state’s fixed National Food Security Act quota.

The current home state bears the costs of distribution – dealer commissions, administration, logistics – without compensation from either the Centre or the state of origin.

Third, centralised platform monitoring.

The Integrated Management of Public Distribution System centralises data visibility and system control while decentralising operational responsibility. States must integrate with centrally determined protocols and bear implementation costs, while the Centre controls system parameters and inter-state connectivity.

High portability volumes thus become highly visible within a system calibrated to frozen National Food Security Act ceilings.

This differentiation sharpened after the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, launched during the Covid-19 crisis, was merged with the National Food Security Act in 2023, making all grain under the act free nationwide.

While presented as universal expansion, this raised subsidy baselines without revisiting frozen coverage or reallocating fiscal responsibility.

Delhi’s ‘success’ in context

Delhi’s dominance in inter-state portability statistics illustrates how circulation can obscure coverage. Its 3.7 million annual inter-state transactions are made by less than 4% of the city’s estimated migrant population.

Even among the 4.65 million out-of-state residents who have completed e-KYC registration for the programme, only 6.6% actually draw grain. The platform produces visibility of movement and identity, not meaningful access.

Karnataka: Fiscal exhaustion under mandatory portability

Karnataka illustrates how portability interacts with state-funded expansion. Through its Anna Bhagya scheme, the state extended coverage far beyond its National Food Security Act allocation, committing to free distribution of additional grain financed through state procurement.

Reported expenditures on Anna Bhagya place its annual cost at around Rs 10,000 crore, imposing a significant fiscal burden on Karnataka. Its expanded coverage is financed entirely from state resources, with no cushioning from discretionary central allocations.

After the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana made National Food Security Act grain free, Karnataka was politically compelled to extend free distribution to its state-scheme beneficiaries as well, further increasing subsidy obligations.

Mandatory portability in 2024 required the state to serve migrant beneficiaries from elsewhere while grain deductions applied to their home states – typically National Food Security Act-only states facing no additional fiscal pressure.

With inter-state connectivity controlled centrally and fiscal strain mounting, Karnataka has had little incentive to actively expand inter-state portability. State data show minimal growth in inter-state transactions despite substantial in-migration.

Kerala: Political risk and the visibility of expansion

Kerala’s experience highlights a different constraint. While its National Food Security Act ceiling covers 1.55 crore people, the state maintains near-universal coverage for its resident population, serving a total of 2.5 crore beneficiaries through its civil supplies system.

The gap is bridged through tide-over allocations – additional grain supplied by the Centre. These were a one-time arrangement made during the rollout of the National Food Security Act to accommodate states whose existing coverage exceeded their new statutory ceilings. These are discretionary allocations, neither formula-based nor renegotiable, and unavailable to states like Karnataka that were not on the initial list.

Migrants present a structural problem within this framework. Portability under the One Nation One Ration Card programme applies only to National Food Security Act cards registered in the central system. Migrants from states like Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, holding National Food Security Act cards, can claim grain in Kerala. But extending Kerala’s expanded coverage to all migrants would require state-funded procurement – escalating costs.

Kerala hosts an estimated 55 lakh migrant workers, of whom several lakh do not have Public Distribution System cards. Since states were notified in March 2025 of mandatory nationwide e-KYC for Public Distribution System beneficiaries, Kerala claims to have registered over 98% of its beneficiary base, including 15.9 lakh out-of-state residents.

Yet despite this significant migrant presence, inter-state portability transactions in Kerala remain negligible each month. The Integrated Management of Public Distribution System renders transaction volumes visible within a system calibrated to frozen National Food Security Act ceilings.

High inter-state portability would make the scale of Kerala’s expanded distribution conspicuous on central dashboards, registering as fiscal indiscipline under the central monitoring system .

The state has fully enabled portability within its borders while limiting exposure to the inter-state grid – a rational adaptation to an architecture that penalises the visibility of welfare expansion.

Platform design and the discipline of expansion

These differing outcomes reflect a cumulative institutional and fiscal trajectory. State-led Public Distribution System expansion during the 2000s was followed in 2015 by the freezing of National Food Security Act coverage, the deployment in 2018 of the Integrated Management of Public Distribution System, the integration in 2023 of of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana and mandatory inter-state portability in 2024 – all occurring after the introduction of Goods and Services Tax that significantly reduced the abilities of states to raise revenues.

States that remain within centrally fixed quotas experience portability as costless redistribution rather than proactive welfare expansion. Welfare innovation is neither the primary objective of this design nor rewarded – it is disciplined and constrained by the architecture itself.

Migrants, invoked as the moral rationale for reform, are included where inclusion is fiscally neutral and constrained where it exposes the costs of past state-led expansion. One Nation One Ration Card thus delivers portability without expansion, redistribution without compensation, and monitoring without recalibration of entitlement.

Veena Naregal is professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.