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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Is the BPL census correctly structured?

Is the BPL census correctly structured?

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published Published on Aug 19, 2011   modified Modified on Aug 19, 2011

-The Business Standard

 

Much depends on a strong implementation framework but the imposition of a cap by the Planning Commission could lead to arbitrary exclusions.

Himanshu
Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The methodology, which is based on the framework suggested by the Saxena Committee, uses indicators that have been refined using a large-scale pilot survey

There are over 400 million poor (the number varies depending on which estimate you choose ranging from the Tendulkar Committee to the Arjun Sengupta Committee). While there is no consensus on the number of poor, there is less so on who are the poor. Within the so-called poor, each household is different from the other. There cannot be any fixed criteria to characterise them — more so because each of them have multiple deprivations with unique characteristics. There is no doubt that any generalised identification criteria would lead to the problem of some being wrongly excluded and some being wrongly included in the category of poor.

The problem is compounded by the political economy of rural India. Particularly when the numbers are large and access to government benefits is crucial to your survival. It is a struggle to get as many benefits from the state. And in this struggle, it is the poor who are pushed out.

The present proposal of the Below Poverty Line (BPL) census uses a three-stage classification exercise by, first, excluding the rich using exclusion criteria, including the poorest of the poor using the inclusion criteria, and then including households using selected deprivation indicators. The methodology, which is based on the framework suggested by the Saxena Committee, uses indicators that have been refined using a large-scale pilot survey. Nonetheless, the pilot can only help in arriving at a set of indicators that satisfy some of the basic properties. Any pilot or any other academic exercise cannot claim that the indicators are the best. What the pilot does is to select a few out of a possible set using some normative criteria of them being a good proxy of poverty. While some of these may be an advance over those suggested by the Saxena Committee in terms of better defined, verifiable and strong proxies of poverty, they are not the perfect indicators. In a way, the pilot confirmed the complexity (and near impossibility) of identifying perfect indicators.

The BPL process is a two-part one. Although the design part is important (and that is where the pilot comes in), it is meaningless in the absence of equally strong and transparent implementation framework. If genuinely implemented with full transparency, it at least ensures a lower possibility of tampering and willful fudging of the process. Yet it is wishful thinking that the process will remain immune to political interference. The rich and powerful will try to tamper and corrupt the system. Design alone is not enough. For honest implementation we need committed people in the local bureaucracy, including Panchayats. Although the pilot is helpful in designing indicators that are less prone to tampering and easily verifiable, there is no reason to assume that this will weed out other influences. The procedure adopted suggests that the entire data be put in the public domain and be discussed with the community and immediately transferred on electronic tablets to a central data bank. It also involves the close involvement of local elected representatives and civil society. So tampering would be difficult. But these are all assumptions on a theoretical platform. How it works on the ground has to be seen.

But even when these problems can be overcome, what has made the process difficult is the arbitrary caps set by the Planning Commission on the number of people who can come in the BPL category. This forces people to choose among people who are alike and leads to arbitrary methods to select the beneficiaries. The more powerful would eventually edge out the weaker ones.

However, the pilot confirms that the best way to include more poor and reduce the errors is to get rid of the caps and enlarge the coverage. If the purpose is to make sure that no poor is left out, there is no other way but to remove the caps. The best way to use the census is as a ranking of households that includes everybody who is not excluded, which is what the current BPL survey does, thus overcoming the limitations put by the caps.

Biraj Patnaik
Principal Advisor to the Supreme Court Commissioners in Right to Food case

The imposition of caps will make the entire BPL exercise fraught with the same problems that afflicted the previous exercise

The next round of the BPL survey has been merged with the caste census and the exercise is being called the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011. The last BPL survey, an exercise that identifies which of the rural households can be designated as “poor”, was conducted in 2002. The surveyof 2002 was based on widely-criticised 13-point criteria that even the ministry of rural development acknowledges as being deeply flawed. Subsequently, the survey results were stayed by the Supreme Court and rendered infructuous. The ministry of rural development was directed by the Supreme Court to conclude a fresh survey by the beginning of the Eleventh Plan (2007).

The SECC 2011, which has come five years late, is the exercise that has been initiated by the ministry of rural development in order to get information about rural households for the purposes of the caste census as well as for identification of the rural poor. Indisputably, the SECC is a vast improvement from the BPL Census of 2002. At the heart of the methodology is the Saxena Committee’s recommendation of automatic exclusion, automatic inclusion and ranking of the rest of the households based on socio-economic indicators. Also, for the first time the entire methodology of the BPL survey has been comprehensively piloted by the ministry of rural development.

There is, however, one significant commonality between the SECC 2011 and the previous BPL surveys, and that is the imposition of the poverty “caps” on the results of the survey. Imagine a situation where the government tells the Registrar General of India, who conducts the Census operations, that he should conduct a census enumeration exercise that ensures that the population of India does not exceed one billion. Ridiculous as this proposition may sound, this is precisely what the ministry of rural development will end up doing if it conducts the SECC and is asked to apply a cap of 42 per cent of rural households that will be deemed to be poor by the Planning Commission. The imposition of the “poverty caps” is not in the design of the ministry of rural development; it has been imposed by the Planning Commission. The imposition of caps will make the entire BPL exercise fraught with the same problems that afflicted the previous exercise.

The imposition of poverty caps is inherently unconstitutional. It violates the principle of equality that is integral to the constitutional scheme of things. It is quite possible for two households in two different states with exactly the same deprivations and the same points in the BPL survey to be either classified as “poor” or “non-poor” depending on the poverty cap that has been fixed by the Planning Commission for their respective states. The issue of “poverty caps” is being deliberated on by the Supreme Court that has repeatedly asked the government why the cap should not be removed. What has also irked the Supreme Court, as it has a vast majority of the thinking Indians, is how the second-fastest growing economy in the world can continue with a system that does not consider anyone, whether in rural or urban areas, spending more than Rs 18 or Rs 20 per day per capita (2004-05 prices) for all their consumption needs, including for health, housing and education, besides food, as not being poor.

The SECC 2011 also runs foul of Supreme Court orders that have designated certain categories of households as the “poorest of the poor”. These include disabled, widows and destitute households and so on. But for “primitive” tribal groups and destitute households, the SECC does not consider the other households for mandatory inclusion.

The imposition of “caps” and the non-inclusion of some of the poorest and most marginalised groups in the country under the mandatory inclusion category vastly diminishes the potential of the SECC 2011 to, for the first time, allow the Indian state to identify the poor in India.

The Business Standard, 17 August, 2011, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/isbpl-census-correctly-structured/445977/

Tagged with: bpl Poverty



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