National Advisory Council (NAC) member NC Saxena has greeted with scepticism the government statement on Monday that the proposed food security Bill and several other welfare schemes of the government would be largely delinked from the official poverty line. Saxena, who headed the Planning Commission panel on rural poor, believes the deprived sections have little reason for cheer in the government?s assertion that instead of the poverty line, a new enumeration of the poor based on the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) would be used for identifying the beneficiaries of welfare schemes.
Speaking to FE, Saxena said only the rural poor will be identified through SECC as the criterion for enumerating the urban poor through this census was yet to be finalised.
?First, the SECC would gauge only rural poverty, and secondly, even the NAC proposal for prioritising 41% of people for food security, which is already accepted by the government, follows the formula which state governments anyway use for the Targeted Public Distribution System,? he said.
Essentially, what Saxena says is that there wasn’t a need to read too much into the Planning Commission’s promise that notwithstanding the poverty line, entitlements would reach larger segments of the population.
?The government?s affidavit in the Supreme Court (which said an urban inhabitant spending more than R32 a day is above the poverty line) was nothing new and what was announced thereafter was also not different from what was already there,? he said.
?The essential question of how many poor people are there (in the country) and who they are, remains,? he said. ?The only way around it is to make most of the welfare programmes universal. I don?t see the government excluding people who hold BPL cards now from the programmes just because the SECC data set would say something different,? he said.
?Several very important welfare programmes of the government are linked to the BPL list like the TDPS, the Rashtriya Swashtya Bima Yojana, the total sanitation programme and the old age pension scheme,? he noted. ?The methodology for enumerating the poor has always been weak, with 60% of BPL card holders not being genuinely poor,? he said.
Under the TDPS system, most state government followed the BPL plus 10% formula.
The SECC criterion, available on the website of the rural development ministry, follows the compulsory inclusion and exclusion line. Those excluded are income tax payers, people with pucca houses of two to three rooms and those in government service. While the inclusion criteria applies to primitive tribal groups, households without shelters, beggars, freed bonded labour and manual scavengers. Then there are those whose ?degree of deprivation is indicated through whether they have pucca homes, whether there is an adult in the family within the age group of 16-59, whether the household is headed by a female, a household unit headed by a disabled with no other adult who is able bodied, SC/ST households, literacy levels and whether the household derives a large part of its income from manual, casual labour.
Even with this set of criteria which would be transposed with SECC data, Saxena says the purpose may not be served. ?I very much doubt whether this will yield good results,? he said.