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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Poor count

To help the poor, there must be one agreed way of identifying them first. If perceptions differ regarding who is poor and, thus, how many poor people there are, it will be difficult to select the right institutional measures and the amount of money to be spent on poverty eradication programmes. The differences between the findings of the N.C. Saxena report and and the Planning Commission’s assessment of the below-the-poverty-line population seem to have created precisely this dilemma for the government. It is not only confusing, it is also embarrassing, since the government itself had appointed the committee to work out new criteria to identify BPL families. The government apparently felt that the earlier criteria were inadequate. Yet, when the Saxena report came up with the new criteria and a count that put the national average of the poor in India at 50 per cent rather than the 28 per cent of the Planning Commission estimate, the government appeared far from pleased. To accept the committee’s estimates would set all earlier fund allocations awry.

One example of a different criterion is average per head spending. The Saxena committee uses as exclusion line Rs 1000 a month in urban areas and Rs 700 in rural areas, whereas the Planning Commission’s figures are Rs 539 and Rs 356 for the same categories respectively. It would be pertinent to ask exactly how a person can exist, even in a village, by spending a notional Rs 356 on himself in a month. Obviously, that sum had not satisfied the government either. But it may now look more sensible than revising the BPL list radically, as the Saxena committee findings seem to demand. Yet such a revision is unavoidable if any notice is taken of the other findings. For example, only 49.1 per cent of the poorest quintile in the country possess BPL or Antyodaya Anna Yojana cards, while 17.4 per cent of the richest quintile of the population have them. More, 23 per cent of the poor do not have ration cards at all. According to the Saxena report, the exclusion of some of the poorest people from the BPL list shows that they still have no voice. This bodes ill for a list meant to ensure food security and some kind of work for the most vulnerable and underprivileged. The rights to food, to education and to work, that is, the right to a livable life, are at risk because India has not yet been able to decide who needs help most.