-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...
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Too poor to qualify for loans -Mehboob Jeelani
-The Hindu Banks continue denying loans to low-income groups, insisting on sticking to a standard EMI route even though they are dealing with a complex social issue. In July 2012, Pradeep Kumar, a 36-year-old resident of Ladpur, a shanty town that sits on the north-western periphery of Delhi, applied for an employment loan at the magistrate’s office in Kanjawala district. Under the Pradhan Mantri Rozgar Yojana or PMRY — a funding policy...
More »Chuck the BPL card -Mihir Shah
-The Indian Express SECC opens the door to step away from the poverty line as a criterion for government benefits. The Government of India has just released data from the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011. It is perhaps the most ambitious exercise of this kind ever conducted in human history. The SECC 2011 has three parts: census of rural India, conducted by the Union ministry of rural development (MoRD), census...
More »SECC not irrelevant just yet -Rukmini S
-The Hindu Although the SECC’s objectives are not likely to be met, it is a big step towards providing accurate information on the well-being of the people. The release of data for rural households from the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) is only the latest step in India’s tortured history of trying to count its poor. The idea behind the SECC was technocratic. Commissioned by the United Progressive Alliance in 2011,...
More »92% rural homes run on less than Rs 10,000 per month -Subodh Varma
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Giving a more storied picture of rural India, the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) released on Friday says that a staggering 92% of rural households reported their maximum income below Rs 10,000 per month. Nearly three quarters of all rural household said that the income of the highest earning member was Rs 5,000 or less. The SECC was conducted during 2011-12 with some states completing it...
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