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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Looking for the Poor

Looking for the Poor

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published Published on Nov 2, 2011   modified Modified on Nov 2, 2011
-EPW
 
The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes.

The context for the Planning Commission’s (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line – Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban areas and Rs 26 in rural India – has subsided, it is not clear if we are any closer to taking a correct decision on who will be covered by welfare programmes. All that we know from the joint statement issued by the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the union minister for rural development is that the state-wise poverty numbers – based on the PC’s methodology – will not be used to set ceilings (“caps”) on the number of households to be covered in each state by specific programmes. What the statement was silent about was if a different set of caps will henceforth be applied and if these caps will operate within the ceiling of the national poverty ratio. In other words, first, capping is still on the table. Second, the union cabinet, when earlier clearing the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC), had taken a decision on which kind of household would be automatically excluded, which one included and how to “score” deprivation indices of others, and had linked the size of the beneficiary population to the PC’s poverty ratios. It has now been decided that yet another committee of experts will make recommendations on how to use the information of the SECC.
 
Fiscal considerations drove the introduction of the “targeted” public distribution system (TPDS), which in turn called for the ­design of the “Below the Poverty Line” (BPL) Census. It is now ­almost universally accepted that targeting – whichever the programme and whatever the criterion used – has led to errors in exclusion (i e, those who should be covered are not) that are substantially larger than the errors in inclusion (i e, those who should not be covered are). Yet the government and those who would like to shut down all anti-poverty programmes prefer to focus on the errors of inclusion, which is not surprising given their concern with containing the fiscal deficit.
 
It is unfortunate that the debate begins with the premise that some caps (poverty line based or any other) are necessary. It is sometimes argued that it may be better to have universal coverage with an appropriate design of self-selection. This would prevent any errors in exclusion and inclusion and simultaneously contain the costs of administration. This is how the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) programme – which is not restricted to BPL families – has been designed. Some programmes – like the Indira Awaas Yojana – may yet call for identification since unlike the gains from labouring on an MGNREGA project those to be had from grabbing a house site would be tempting to even the well-off. As far as total costs are concerned, a universal PDS may be more expensive than even a poorly designed TPDS, but in other programmes universalisation with self-targeting should not lead to higher outlays. Therefore, some ­programmes may lend themselves to universalisation and others may require the use of identi­fication criteria. There is admittedly no simple solution and there are numerous programmes other than the PDS such as the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, the Indira Awaas Yojana and the new National Rural Livelihoods Mission which currently use BPL criteria to identify beneficiaries.
 
The design of the SECC that is now being conducted – with how much preparation and how much rigour in comparison to the population census we do not know – is an improvement over the earlier BPL Censuses. But, as commentators have pointed out, the SECC too is not free from possible problems and pilot surveys have reportedly shown up complications. Instead of looking for a single measure of identification – based either on consumption expenditure norms or on a deprivation index as likely from the SECC – it may be better to rank households on different criteria (see “The BPL Census and a Possible Alternative”, EPW, 27 February 2010, for a proposal on identifying a “Social Assistance Base”). Then, depending on the programme that is being administered, households could be chosen on where they rank on appropriate criteria (for example, possession of a pukka house for a housing programme, age of the head of the household for a pension scheme, etc).
 
Sadly, these difficult but very important issues were ignored in the frenzy about the poverty line and poverty numbers that swept the newspapers and the airwaves. The poverty line is not a new concept; it has been around in official India for almost half a century. Academics have wrestled with its meaning and measurement for even longer. There is an unresolved and heated dispute about the correct measure and how the incidence of poverty in India has moved over the years. Yet, this has never been of concern to the media. The recent avalanche of comment and abuse was a comment on how fashions can grip a media, which after refusing for years to acknowledge the pittance of an income that many million Indians live on every month, suddenly – but only fleetingly – seized upon the absurdity of the current official poverty line. The PC certainly needed to be placed in the dock for claiming before the Supreme Court, “The recommended poverty lines ensure the adequacy of actual private expenditure per capita near the poverty lines on food, education and health...” But the disclosure of the PC’s affidavit was an occasion to address the more important issue of access to the government’s anti-poverty/welfare programmes. There, once again, we failed.

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XLVI, No. 45, 5 November, 2011, http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/190575/

Tagged with: Poverty bpl



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