SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW SEPTEMBER 10, 2016 vol lI no 37 51 Credibility and Portability? Lessons from CORE PDS Reforms in Chhattisgarh Anuradha Joshi, Dipa Sinha, Biraj Patnaik We thank Vaibhav Raaj, Vanita Leah Falcao, Sonal Matharu and Ana Abbas for the research assistance provided during the study. This research was supported by the Accountable Grant funded by the Department for International Development at the Institute of Development Studies. Many thanks are due to Samir Garg and Sulakshana Nandi of the Right to Food Campaign in Chhattisgarh, A K Somashekar and numerous others at the National Informatics Centre, and state-level activists with the Right to Food campaign, provided invaluable help in the field. Anuradha Joshi (a.joshi@ids.ac.uk) is with the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex; Dipa Sinha (dipa@aud.ac.in) is with the Ambedkar University, Delhi and Biraj Patnaik (biraj.patnaik@gmail.com) is with the Office of Commissioners (on Right to Food) to the Supreme Court of India. Examining the Centralised Online Real-time Electronic Public Distribution System reforms introduced by the Government of Chhattisgarh to understand the processes and conditions under which such reforms strengthen accountability and affect the delivery of public services, it is found that while earlier reforms have been successful, the contribution of CORE PDS has been useful but limited. A significant finding was that technological fixes for social protection programmes are only feasible insofar as they work within the political logic of the context in question. CORE PDS reforms could not address the issues of power imbalances between shop owners and cardholders which continue to shape interactions between them. Introducing transparency, accountability and quasi-market reforms in this context offered limited possibilities in what they could achieve. O ver the past decades, new technologies have offered innovative ways to improve the delivery of public services and tackle old problems of corruption and accountability in the public sector. Increasingly, information and communica- tions technology ( ICT )-based governance reforms are being implemented throughout the developing world. These include forms of crowd-sourcing information (for example, election monitoring), using ICTs to increase efficiency (computerised land registry systems) and connecting users to service providers (mobile phone-based health services). We examine the use of ICTs in improving access to and effectiveness of welfare entitlements in Chhattisgarh in central India. Since 2012, the Government of Chhattisgarh has been experimenting with improvements in the delivery of subsi- dised food through the public distribution system ( PDS ) by cre- ating “portability” of entitlements, through the use of smart ration cards ( SRCs ), in combination with real-time monitoring ( RTM) of uptake. By portability we mean that a ration card- holder could draw their entitlement of foodgrains from any fair price shop ( FPS ) with the new SRC, rather than being lim- ited to the specific shop that they were registered at, as is the case in most parts of the country. A key element of the reform was to capture in real-time, the transactions between benefi- ciaries and FPS operators who sell subsidised grain. The reform programme—Centralised Online Real-time Electronic ( CORE) PDS—was piloted initially in five FPSs in the capital city Raipur, with full political commitment. By early 2013, it was extended to four districts (Raipur, Rajnandgaon, Mahasamund and Durg). It was then expanded to cover all the corporations in the state. Given this context of high levels of political will and a supportive bureaucracy, the key issue is whether ICT-based reforms can deliver. Our research asked the question: under what conditions, and through what processes can technology-based reforms strengthen accountability and affect the delivery of public services? We also explored two sub-questions: (i) Does the portability implied by CORE reforms enable citizens to better access services and monitor shop holders? (ii) What impact do the CORE reforms seem to have on the effectiveness of the delivery of the PDS? Overall, we found that CORE PDS reforms had a limited impact in relation to all of the questions posed above. In practice, the portability offered by the CORE reforms were low for rea- sons related to lack of awareness and low demand. Further, it turned out that CORE reforms have had limited scope and