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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Planning Commission may finally have some idea about poor

Planning Commission may finally have some idea about poor

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published Published on Oct 4, 2011   modified Modified on Oct 4, 2011

-The Economic Times

 

The Planning Commission, under a sustained attack from the Union Cabinet and the National Advisory Council over its affidavit to the Supreme Courtthat claimed that the rural poor can take care of his food, educational and health requirements with 25 a day, is expected to revise its stand on Monday.

This follows a meeting between Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh here on Sunday. Singh is learnt to have conveyed disquiet within the government and outside over the plan panel's poverty figures. The Plan panel affidavit gave government's rivals yet another opportunity to claim that the government was reality-challenged.

After NAC members Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander, it was the turn of another Sonia Gandhi-led panel member NC Saxena to poke fun at the Planning Commission's approach towards poverty issues.

"On 32 a day (for the urban poor), you know only dogs and animals can live,'' he had said. People who are spending below 32 (a day)... They are poorest of the poor. You can call them destitute, you can call them people living in sub-human level,'' the NAC member added.

The Planning Commission deputy chief, who returned from a 10-day foreign visit on Saturday, met the prime minister on Sunday, for the first time since the controversy erupted in the wake of the affidavit filed by the plan panel in the Supreme Court. As per the affidavit, a family of five spending less than 4,824 (at June, 2011, prices) in urban areas will fall in the BPL (Below Poverty Line) category. The expenditure limit for a family in rural areas has been fixed at 3,905.

The number of poor entitled to BPL benefits, as per the affidavit, has been estimated at 40.74 crore, as against 37.2 crore estimated at the time of accepting theTendulkar Committee report.

Officials in the Planning Commission have said that providing benefits to more persons would defeat the purpose of the anti-poverty programme. Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi is believed to have intervened in the matter and reportedly asked the plan panel to do a rethink on its definition of poverty.

Ahluwalia is also scheduled to meet Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh on Monday to discuss the issue. Ramesh had voiced his disagreement with the Plan panel over its poverty figures by writing a letter to Ahluwalia on September 23.

He had questioned the panel's methodology and said relying on its estimate to arrive at cut offs will not resolve the problem.

Asserting that there was need for different yardsticks to identify household for various schemes, he proposed three options, one of which (Plan A) suggests that there should be no single BPL list or card. Instead, he suggests that there should be an exclusion criteria and "all the non-excluded households be part of one main list with subsidiary lists for specific programmes.''

These households will be entitled to various schemes based on their various deprivation and inclusion criteria and a cumulative score, he added.

Relying on poverty estimates of Planning Commission to arrive at cut-offs will not resolve this problem in any manner. There will have to be different cut-offs for different dimensions and the problem of bunching and exclusion errors will remain,'' the union minister said in his letter.

Alarmed over the fallout of the plan panel's document, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni had said on Saturday that the Planning Commission had given an affidavit.

"When we asked for information from the panel regarding it, we were told that it is an initial document and not the final document. These figures could undergo a change, who knows some other statistics may come up, which is acceptable to the Planning Commission,'' she said.

The Economic Times, 3 October, 2011, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-10-03/news/30238418_1_plan-panel-planning-commission-tendulkar-committee-report


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