PDS checks: Centre flags 262,000 govt staff availing of subsidised grains

In a rare move, the government has flagged 262,000 of its own employees in ongoing checks of public distribution system (PDS) records for possible wrongful benefits in terms of subsidised foodgrains, a senior government official said.

The employees thus flagged comprise 182,283 from Indian Railways , 37,029 from India Post, and an additional 42,968 identified through the Public Financial Management System (PFMS). The ration cards linked to these records cover 10,17,647 beneficiaries, including family members.

To be sure, the cards account for only about 0.13% of the roughly 20.5 crore ration cards digitised under the NFSA across India.

“Most state governments disqualify central/state government employees as an exclusion criterion under the scheme, which makes this so puzzling,” the official cited above added on condition of anonymity.

PFMS is a government platform used to track and manage payments and other financial transactions under various government schemes and programmes.

The exercise is now set to widen, with the Union government seeking personnel data from the defence services and the home ministry. This could bring two of the country’s largest government workforces into the cross-check.

To be sure, the official said that being flagged does not mean a beneficiary has been found to be ineligible. “These may or may not be wrongful. We have asked states to verify the names before removing anybody from the beneficiary list.”

Many states list government employment as grounds for excluding a household from the priority category under the National Food Security Act.

In Bihar, one of the country’s largest and poorest states, households with a government employee are among those excluded from the PDS. The state’s 2015 notification on this defines government service to include regular employment in the Centre and state governments, state-owned firms, local bodies and autonomous government institutions.

The rules are not uniform across states. Nagaland, for instance, excludes Central and state government employees only when the family’s annual income is above ₹2.5 lakh.

However, according to the official, “most government employees earn more than this threshold.”

PDS is the government’s main food distribution system, through which eligible households receive foodgrains at subsidised rates. It is enacted under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, which sets the broad entitlement and coverage framework, while states identify eligible households using their own exclusion/inclusion criteria.

Under NFSA, up to 75% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population can be covered as eligible households. The Centre supplies foodgrains to states, while state governments identify eligible households and issue ration cards based on their own criteria.

For FY27, the Centre has budgeted ₹2.27 lakh crore for food subsidy, down marginally from the nearly ₹2.28 lakh crore in it spent in FY26 as per the government’s revised estimate.

This means the rules used to decide who qualifies differ state to state, which is why the Centre has asked for a verification and not deletion of the flagged accounts.