Ration shops see early crowds to pick up dole

TNN | Apr 3, 2020, 04.20 AM IST

Madurai: People turned out at ration shops in Madurai early for their share of the dole being provided by the government with many shops seeing the supplies emptied by afternoon as only 50 were given tokens in the morning.

The government is providing a dole of Rs 1,000 in cash, rice, dhal, oil and sugar to relieve the stress of families whose members have not been able to go for work due to the lockdown. This curfew has affected the daily wagers more as they usually buy their groceries and rice once in two days, and cannot afford to buy and stock it in advance.

On Thursday, minister for cooperatives Sellur K Raju launched the distribution of the dole at a ration shop in Ponmeni. He said there were a total of 32,965 ration shops in the state including 23,486 full-time through which the dole was being distributed. There are 2,01,46,933 ration card holders in Tamil Nadu. Madurai has a total of 1,356 ration shops, 1,093 of them fulltime, and 8,30,00,622 card holders. The shops would ensure that 100 people got their relief measures a day. People coming to the shops should ensure they wear protective masks and the salesman and police would ensure they bought the groceries only after sanitizing their hands.

People need not worry if they had not bought their ration for March as they could avail it in April quota. People who received SMS without receiving cash relief or the essentials could lodge complaints with the concerned authorities. It would be ensured that all the card holders got their share, he said. Social distancing was maintained well in many of the shops where the essentials were distributed on Monday. Kameswari who received her dole in a shop in Anna Nagar said that she was relieved as the price of condiments had gone up in the last one week.

WhatsApp messages were circulated claiming that inferior quality rice had been distributed. The district collector acted immediately and ensured that about eight bags of rice in that particular shop were replaced with better quality rice.