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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The magic of state support by Sreelatha Menon

The magic of state support by Sreelatha Menon

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published Published on Jan 17, 2011   modified Modified on Jan 17, 2011

Rajasthan's Jatawali village hosts a debate on census showing how rural India badly needs state help.

An old couple in Jatavali village in Choumu tehsil of Jaipur were having an early lunch at noon with their daughter. The man had a roti and a large chunk of crumpled baati (baked wheat balls) and a fairly large bowl of dal. He was making little cakes of baati, dipping them in the dal and chewing them. The daughter was having the baati with curd.

The old man was a farmer with three bighas of land and his son worked as a labourer in a stone factory. He has a below poverty line card and the wheat and pulses they were eating were bought with that card. He said he gets 25 kg wheat for Rs 2 a kg and two kg matar dal for Rs 15 every month.

He is a Brahmin and may find it difficult to retain the card if the new Below Poverty Line (BPL) census is done on the basis of caste.

In the village, a seminar was going on in a resort on the subject of identification of the poor and the BPL census.It was presided over by the Rural Development Minister, C P Joshi and organised by the University of Rajasthan.

A raging debate was on as to who should be categorised as poor. Planning Commission’s Abhijit Sen said there was no one way people could be called poor and so all methods were bound to go wrong. Joshi seemed to ageee with this thinking. Both said the rural job scheme’s formula was the ideal one.

Yet, the Prime Minister’s Office is about to decide whether those the government considers Above Poverty Line (APL) should be denied cheap food altogether.

It seemed too good to be true. Almost every scheme was working in this village, unknown to those hosting the seminar.

Most households in the harijan colony had BPL cards. And not one complaint was heard about the fair price shop denying anyone his ration quota.

There were those who had APL cards and were getting 10 kg wheat but no pulses. Most villagers worked 90-100 days last year under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). This was despite the fact that the old woman sarpanch in the village was known to be ineffective and her son was believed to be running the show, mostly to benefit himself.

NREGS fetched the villagers around Rs 90 a day, they said. It was mostly women who benefited from the scheme.

If fact, even the public distribution system benefits women and children the most, irrespective of the APL or BPL status of their families. This is because they are dependents in most parts of rural India and so should be categorised as deserving state help.

In neighbouring Bhilpura village, a concrete house stood on the road side. An old woman was baking rotis with her daughter-in-law. The house had about ten members, including three brothers and their families, and a mentally retarded youth. They belonged to other backward castes, the family said.

They had a BPL card. They had about 15 bighas land and made about Rs 8,000 a year from growing grains, consuming some of the output. The eldesh son ran a dhaba in front. Probably some of the 25 kg wheat was used there. But did that matter?

If the intention of the state is to help people rise out of poverty, the least it can do is to provide cheap food and means of income to the aged, women and children, or even something better, rather than finding ways to keep them out.



The Business Standard, 16 January, 2011, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/the-magicstate-support/421904/


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