AHMEDABAD: A fresh disclosure in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday has brought Gujarat’s food security framework under intense scrutiny, revealing 75,17,392 active ration cards but overshadowed by a persistent and rising wave of deletions across the past five years.

In total, Gujarat has removed 6.34 lakh ration cards between 2020 and October 2025, revealing a continuous churn in its beneficiary list.

The deletions signal an ongoing verification drive that has raised pressing questions on beneficiary identification, data accuracy and administrative accountability.

What began in 2020 as a seemingly routine correction with 47,936 deletions ballooned dramatically in 2021, when removals shot up to 2,19,151, sparking immediate questions about what exactly was being filtered out.

The trend continued: 1,32,519 deletions in 2022, 1,35,362 in 2023, and another 30,889 in 2024 kept the system in constant churn. By October 2025, an additional 69,102 cards had already been deleted.

In total, Gujarat has struck 6.34 lakh ration cards from its lists in six years, a scale that makes clear this was no one-time clean-up.

The spike of 2021 marked the highest annual jump, but the momentum in 2022 and 2023 each crossing 1.3 lakh deletions showed that the pruning exercise had become structural.