Large number of BPL families not on list: ministry panel

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New Delhi: Exposing flaws in the system of identification Below Poverty Lines (BPL) families by the government for implementing its mega anti-poverty programmes including Targetted Public Distribution System, an expert committee set up by rural development ministry has said that large number of families living under chronic poverty are often excluded from BPL lists.

“The starkest statistics that emerges that only 49.1% of the poorest quintile the country possess BPL/Antoyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) cards while 17.4% of the richest quintiles of the population possessed a BPL/AAY cards,” the committee chaired by NC Saxena, Supreme Court-appointed food commissioner, has said in its draft report.

The report also said about 23% of the poor people did not hold any ration cards. “The exclusion errors from BPL lists frequently reflect the powerlessness of the most vulnerable and are a direct function of their weak political bargaining power and our inability to include them in state programmes in the last sixty years is a severe indictment of public policy and its implementation,” Saxena committee has observed in its report.

While advocating exclusion of large number of families from the BPL lists, the committee has recommended that those families having double the land of the district average of the agricultural land or two wheeler or one running bore well or income tax payers would deleted from the BPL lists.

It recommended automatic inclusion of families fulfilling criteria including designated ‘primitive tribe’, designated dalit groups, homeless household etc.

After more than two years into 11th Five Year Plan, the rural development ministry last year had appointed a committee headed by former rural development secretary M Shankar to ascertain the number of the poor people in order to effectively identify beneficiaries for the Centre’s new programmes aimed at poverty alleviation.. Saxena headed the committee after Shankar resigned.

The mandate of the committee was also to look at revising the 14 parameters laid out by the earlier Sajeeva Reddy committee to calculate the BPL figures in the states. The rural development ministry had found flaws in the 14-point eligibility of Reddy committee.

The committee has recommended that survey for BPL rural families to be undertaken across the country during August 2009—January 2010 as work on census 2011 would start from next year requiring large number of field staff.