What is it about?

India has the largest public distribution system (PDS) in the world, working through over five million fair price shops (FPS) to distribute food grains among its beneficiaries at a subsidized rate. In this paper, the authors study the inventory system of Indian FPS. The system involves a distributor, who is solely responsible for the replenishment of the FPS. In a real-world scenario, the distributor is subjected to random supply and transportation disruptions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and minimize the impacts of such disruptions.

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Why is it important?

The present study addresses the FPS inventory system of Indian PDS, which is by its nature unique and has not been considered by any other previous literature. The findings of this study will be of particular interest to the policy-makers to build a more robust PDS in India.

Perspectives

In this paper, we adopt a simulation-based technique to explore the impacts of various traits of disruptions like frequency and duration on the FPS inventory system. A simulation model for the Indian FPS is developed and the impacts of disruptions are investigated by a case study.

Sayan Chakraborty
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

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This page is a summary of: Managing supply and transportation disruptions: a case of Indian fair price shops, Kybernetes, December 2019, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/k-05-2019-0344.
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