Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan said on Monday that all states and Union Territories of the country, except for Tamil Nadu, will implement the landmark National Food Security Act by March. Twenty-two states and UTs have already rolled out the law, while 14 are in the process of doing so, he said. The Act provides two-thirds of India's citizens five kilograms of subsidised grains each month.

The law was passed by the Parliament in 2013 and state governments were given a year to implement it. The deadline has since been extended thrice, with the latest one ending in September, reported PTI.

A Tamil Nadu government official said that the state can implement the law only in July, since it is rolling out the universal public distribution system. He added that Tamil Nadu is also finding it difficult to identify beneficiaries under the Food Security Act, and is yet to put in place end-to-end computerisation in this regard.