(Extracts from Economic Political Weekly May 3, 2008)

• A very small proportion of rural/urban households actually make purchases from the PDS.
  
  
• As against the estimated incidence of rural household poverty of 24.5 per cent, 3 per cent of the households in rural India possess the Antyodaya card and another 26.5 per cent benefited as BPL ration cardholders; 52 per cent of the rural households were ordinary cardholders while the rest (18.7 per cent) were without any card.
  
  
• The incident of urban poverty was 25.7 per cent of the household; less than 1 per cent of the urban households had an Antyodaya card, 10.5 per cent had BPL cards, 55.6 per cent had ordinary PDS cards and 33.1 per cent had no card.