A STUDY OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

Abstract

India is just six decades old country. The country is trying for overall development since the time of independence. India is home to world’s largest section of bottom of pyramid population. Nation builders have constantly focus on development of this large group by providing basic security of food etc. and opportunities to grow to come out of vicious cycle of poverty. Public Distribution System (PDS) is one such scheme of Government of India (GOI) to provide food security to the poor people of the country. This scheme has gone through various transformations in last four-five decades with respect to scope, target groups and issues of subsidy etc. Economist, health experts, sociologists and experts of development economics has studied the working of PDS. But very few studies are available to handle the PDS as a Supply Chain (SC) activity. PDS as supply chain is studied in this research attempt. The present study has described the SC of food grains under PDS. Though PDS in India provides many times to beneficiaries like sugar and kerosene oil also, but the present study is limited to food grains only. As a study under Supply Chain Management (SCM) principles, PDS can act on both aspects of efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency deals with low cost of SC while effectiveness is related to provide food security cover to large number of population living under below poverty line (BPL). The present study consider Customer Satisfaction (CS) as one of the objective of SC and some important dimensions like number of SKUs, flexibility, subsidy, on time delivery, direct cash transfer scheme, location of Fair Price Shop (FPS) and timely information are studied through a structured questionnaire. The study was conducted for poor people who unfortunately are also deprived of basic education facility and therefore, the questionnaire was administrated in Hindi language. A copy of sample questionnaire is also attached as annexure “A” of this dissertation. Data was collected from more than 300 beneficiaries of PDS scheme and simultaneously issue related to PDS distribution were discussed with government officials like District Supply Officer and Block Development Officers and local municipal councilors to know various challenges in existing PDS. The focus of all these discussions was mainly on SC prospective of PDS. The data was analyzed using SPSS and results of analysis is presented in ii chapter IV of this thesis and attempt is also made to propose a System Dynamics (SD) model for PDS supply chain. The study proposes some SC interventions for PDS so that some objectives can be achieved with lower cost so that extra resources can be used to increase the scope of PDS scheme. Finally the study proposes large number of future research directions including advance modeling of PDS supply chain enablers and barriers, scale development for performance measures, simulation of SD models etc. The overall study is divided into six chapters where chapters are arranged as introduction, review of literature, research methodology, results, discussion and finally conclusion, implications, limitations and future scope.