Exit as Accountability: Can Ration Portability Discipline Dealers Without Excluding the Weakest?

When the Customer Can Walk Away Here is the

tension. A ration dealer with a captive clientele has little reason to give full weight, good grain or courteous service. Letting cardholders walk to another shop changes that. But walking away works only for those who have somewhere to walk to and whose fingerprints the machine will recognise. ONORC has armed one group of beneficiaries while leaving the most vulnerable exposed in a different way.

The case for portability as competition reform The authors' Bihar data is striking.

By their analysis of 891 million transactions, only 38% of February-March transactions were at the assigned shop. Another 55% were at a different shop in the same block. Just 1% crossed State lines. Portability, built for migrants, is mostly used down the road.

The mechanism is simple. A dealer's earnings depend on how much grain they distribute - from April 2022, Rs 90 per quintal in most States. A household that can take its entitlement elsewhere takes that income with it. Before ONORC, the authors argue, the dealer was a local monopolist and households with the least bargaining power - often female-headed or lower-caste - suffered underweighting, poor grain and rude treatment with no recourse.

Now the threat to leave does the work that complaints rarely could. Chhattisgarh found something similar more than a decade earlier: when its reforms let beneficiaries choose shops, leakages fell. This may be one of the most effective welfare reforms the PDS has seen: accountability achieved not through inspectors or grievance cells, but through choice.

The case for caution Exit is only as good as the alternatives.

In a remote village with one shop, portability changes nothing. Authentication is the larger worry. Studies by Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera in Jharkhand found that biometric failures fall hardest on the elderly, disabled people and manual workers whose fingerprints wear down - the very households portability is said to empower.

A system that disciplines dealers can still turn away a widow at the counter. Dealer viability matters too. If customers concentrate at better shops, smaller ones in thin markets may close and fewer shops means less choice over time.

And the authors themselves note that divisibility, the feature that lets families split rations between village and city, remains little used.

Where this leaves us TAN's position is that portability should be treated and strengthened as an accountability tool, not merely a migration tool - but with authentication fallbacks built in as a right, not a favour. The evidence of local switching is too strong to ignore: choice disciplines dealers where inspection has not. The exclusion risk is real, but it calls for fixing authentication - fallback options such as OTP, iris scans or nominee collection - not abandoning portability. States should also track shop density, so that competition does not hollow out access in sparse areas. What would change our view is evidence that portability's gains go mainly to better-off households while authentication failures rise for the poorest. Until then, the power to walk away is a reform worth protecting.