Every poor counts: Block-level picture to capture real suffering

NEW DELHI: The government will compile figures at the district and block levels to arrive at a more accurate identification of poor for better targeting of welfare schemes. So far, the poor in India have only been counted at the national and state levels.
The Planning Commission has commissioned a study which will come up with these relevant numbers soon.

The poverty cut-offs (a minimum monthly expenditure below which people are considered to be poor) at the district and block levels are likely to be announced in three months, Planning Commission member Mihir Shah said in an interaction with ET.

The count will complement the new poverty lines calculated by the Tendulkar committee which has given poverty cut-offs at the national and state levels.

The more disaggregated count is crucial as food and other entitlements for the below poverty line is determined by these cut-offs.

The food security act, which will ensure a given minimum quantity of cheap food to the poor, will be implemented based on the new poverty lines and the fresh BPL census to be carried out soon.

The block-level exercise is part of the government’s over-all efforts to improve the process of identifying the poor and ensuring that its welfare schemes are availed by those it is meant for.

It has already decided to abandon the old rural poverty line which threw up grossly in-adequate numbers of rural poor for a new one suggested by a committee headed by S D Tendulkar. As per the new poverty line, the proportion of poor in the country (based on the data form the National Sample Survey figures of 2004-05) is 41.8% compared to 28.3% projected earlier.

The rural development ministry is also in the process of carrying out a fresh BPL census for identifying poor households as the present list is faulty and excludes some genuinely poor families while including a number of non-poor.

In the absence of block and district level cut-offs, the state governments can apply the state level cut-offs in an arbitrary way which could lead to exclusion of poor living in particular blocks.

“Since there are some blocks in fairly developed states that can be backward while some blocks in backward districts can be developed, the state level cut-offs may not adequately reflect the needs of individual blocks,” Dr Shah pointed out.

Tribal groups mostly live in blocks which can be enclaves of backwardness and have to be correctly targeted, he added.

The BPL census is looking at the possibility of automatic inclusion of all scheduled caste/tribe and muslim rural households in the BPL list in those districts where more than 80% of these households are poor.

However, households that have already been automatically excluded based on the exclusion criteria (conditions that make it obvious that the households can’t be poor), will remain excluded. For validation purposes, the scoring of these households will be done in the pilot projects that are to kick off soon.