People’s Perceptions on the Performance of Public Distribution of Goods: A Study of Capital City of Biggest State of India

The broad objectives of the Government of Indias food security policy are (i) ensuring adequacy and accessibility of food grains to the beneficiaries, and (ii) distributing food grains at an affordable price. The Public Distribution System (PDS), which continues to exist since the Second World War attempts to meet these twin objectives. The public distribution system as a social safety net can be appreciated by the fact that aggregate availability of food grains per se is not enough to ensure the ability of cross-sections of people to buy food grains. National food self-sufficiency by the presence of food in the economy, or in the market, does not automatically ensure food security. Even the ability to buy may not guarantee food security, unless there is an efficient distribution system. Food security may be viewed from a number of angles like spatial and cross-sectional. We consider in this study cross-sectional security. PDS is a rationing mechanism that entitles households well specified quantities of selected commodities at affordable prices to BPL and APL families. The paper focuses on efficiency of PDS in Lucknow Capital city. The data covers 200 beneficiaries from two circles of Lucknow through purposive sampling and Likert scale analysis has been done to find out the efficiency of PDS. The results are attracting the attention of Policy makers for improvement in distribution system.