Thiruvananthapuram | The BJP on Saturday accused the CPI(M)-led Kerala government of appropriating the good schemes of the party-ruled Centre and having the habit of passing their failures onto the Union government.
He also said the state government's data servers need to be upgraded and urged the administration to not point fingers at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that developed the software storing the information.
"We condemn this attitude and remind LDF that such cheap politics will not benefit them. The robust common sense of the citizens of this country understands what is right and what is wrong," senior BJP leader and the party's Kerala in-charge Prakash Javadekar said citing the "latest example of the problem faced by Keralites in getting ration and pension this week." "The state government has said that there is a technical glitch on the servers of NIC. The fact is exactly the opposite. The problem is not with NIC servers, which only maintain the software, but with the Kerala state data centre and servers, which are maintained by the state government. Their own failure, which they are now passing on to NIC and the Central government," Javadekar said in a statement here.
Stating that existing servers at the Kerala state data centre hosting the public distribution system (PDS) application need upgrading as they have been in use for more than seven years, the former Union Minister said running a PoS (point of sale) system for rations is a state government's responsibility.
He said the NIC has developed the application, which is being used in 22 states, and it has time and again asked the Kerala government to change and upgrade the capacity of the servers hosting the PDS.
"Very recently, the servers have been upgraded, and NIC is helping the state government migrate the data to the new servers on a war footing. To facilitate the data migration, the state government itself decided to shut down PDS without telling Keralites the real story," Javadekar alleged.
The senior BJP leader said Aadhar authentication is the responsibility of the respective states, which are Authentication User Agency (AUA), and alleged that the Aadhar authentication platform of the Kerala government is not stable and the dispensation has never bothered to set it right.
"Therefore, authentication in ration shops has become a problem in Kerala. The Kerala government requested that UIDAI do Aadhar authentication on NIC servers to make the system stable. The state government has not told this story to the people of Kerala," he alleged.
Javadekar further claimed that the Kerala government has issued an order for pensioners to be enabled exclusively through Akshaya Centres run by the state government.
He said a petition was filed in the High Court against the exclusive rights given to Akshaya Centres to provide services to pensioners.
"The High Court has stayed the services from Akshaya Centres and ordered further that the state should grant Common Service Centres and other agencies to have access Jeevan Rekha and provide an open portal for eligible pensioners to access Jeevan Rekha software," he said, adding that the Kerala government should learn that "such kind of political tricks won't work" anymore.