Enhancing food security at the last-mile: A light-weight and scalable decision support system for the public distribution system in India

Emanating from the food shortages in the 1960s, the public distribution system (PDS) in India has undergone various transformations through the years to expand food security across different regions of the country. Food grains, procured from the farmers, are processed in mills and transported from the central warehouses to the district warehouses and then finally to the fair price shops in the district. Given the district administration's role in managing public distribution operations by contracting with cooperatives who provide logistics services at the last mile, we develop a light-weight and scalable operations research-based decision support system for food grain distribution from the district warehouses to the fair price shops. Our study focusses on the last-mile distribution in the Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu, India wherein the food grains need to be transported from the eight district warehouses associated with different cooperatives to the fair price shops. Given the current mapping of the district warehouses to the fair price shops, we establish the baseline by running the vehicle routing problem for each district warehouse to arrive at the baseline distances for each district warehouse and the entire district. Subsequently, we perform a remapping of the district warehouses to the fair price shops by running a relaxed version of the assignment problem and then run the vehicle routing problem over these revised clusters. Results indicate that 9% savings in total transportation costs is generated with the remapping procedure. Our light-weight decision support system acts as a valuable policy tool to the district administrators in establishing contracts with the cooperatives for each district warehouse, with implications for scaling it across the country.