The Madhya Pradesh government on Monday awarded a Rs 1,000 crore contract to services and information and communication technologies (ICT) systems integration and distribution company HCL Infosystems to implement India’s largest food coupon based targeted public distribution systems (TPDS) in the state.

“IT-enabled PDS would ensure that the benefit rea­ches the beneficiary by a sy­stem of food coupons,” exe­cutive VP (marketing fun­ctions and R&D), HCL Inf­osyste­ms, George Paul said.

The firm would leverage UIDAI or Aadhaar’s guidelines, which would involve setting up a model of food and civil supplies distribution for over 10 million expected transactions per mo­nth at Rs 10.98 per transaction per family spread over 78 months.

“The standard of Aadhar – photograph, 10 fingerprints, iris scan followed by name, sex, address and parent’s name – would be collated and UID marked number in the ration card would be given to BPL and Antyodaya Anna Yojana families. We are deploying what is called HCL Vistar, which is a framework for citizen mapping registration linked to Aadhaar’s data centre,” Paul said.

In this particular solution the complete registration network, food coupons and link to the supply chain is done by HCL and its partners Accor Services and Virgo Softech, he said.