Calcutta, July 21: The ration card is staging a strong comeback.

“All citizens of India residing in Bengal must possess ration cards,” food and civil supplies minister Naren De said today.

Ubiquitous till the era of shortages ended in the seventies, the ration card was beginning to lose importance in the age of credit cards and voter ID cards.

But the minister has given it a fresh lease. “Many people are not interested in possessing a ration card as they no longer use it for procuring essential commodities at subsidised prices.

“We want to make it clear that ration cards are not just for procuring commodities, it is an important document of citizenship. We have decided to make it mandatory; everyone will have to possess one,” the minister told the Assembly while placing the department budget.

But the ration card he is talking about is not the one at home. De said the government had decided to scrap all existing ration cards and issue new ones by the end of the year. This would mean replacing over eight crore cards.

The new cards, he had said earlier, would come in different colours for people of separate economic strata.

The cost of the new cards would be borne by the owners, unless they fall in the BPL category, De said. A deadline would soon be announced after which all the existing ration cards would stand cancelled.

“We have found that there are thousands of fake ration cards which are difficult to detect. So we feel that issuing new ration cards to residents of the state will help screen the ghost ones,” the minister added.