Counting of poor under SC scanner

The way number of poor in India is measured is under a legal scrutiny. The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the government in Right To Food case the efficacy of the below poverty line survey, to be held in June this year, if all the poor identified fail to get government benefit.

Updated on: Mar 16, 2011, 23:59:32 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The way number of poor in India is measured is under a legal scrutiny. The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the government in Right To Food case the efficacy of the below poverty line survey, to be held in June this year, if all the poor identified fail to get government benefit.

The court asked the government to give reasons for the Planning Commission putting up a cap on the number of poor in India, which many believe is unrealistic.

The petitioner had termed the plan panel estimation as incorrect saying the number of poor families identified during the BPL surveys is much higher that the estimate.

The Central government defines uniform criteria for identification of poor through a BPL survey across India.

The court's observation has come at the time when the Sonia Gandhi headed National Advisory Council is in the process of finalizing the proposed National Food Security law and the rural development ministry is getting the BPL survey done in this June.

The panel estimates the number of poor on basis of National Sample Survey Office's sample survey of expenditure and fixes state-wise number of poor.

The state governments get food grains for the Public Distribution System as per the panel's estimate even if the actual number in the state is higher than the estimate.

As per 2004-05 NSSO survey, those spending less than Rs 12 a day in rural India and those spending less than Rs 17 a day in rural India, were categorized as poor. It meant that 27.5% of Indians were poor.

Subsequently, the commission constituted a committee headed by S C Tendulkar to rework the formulae for determining poor. It listed 46% of Indians poor on basis of daily spending on food, sanitation and education.

The expenditure was Rs 15 per day for an individual in rural India and Rs 19 in urban areas.

The government in 2010 accepted the report but is yet to notify the new poverty estimation, which will make Tendulkar committee figures applicable to all Central government schemes.

The petitioner, People's Union for Civil Liberties, said the National Commission for Enterprise in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) had recommended that all social security schemes benefit should be extended to those, whose per capita per day expenditure is less than Rs 20.

The commission had identified 77% of the country's population in this category.

The different poverty figures has baffled the government, which has asked ministries to use only planning commission figure of 27% in all its communications.

The court asked the government counsel Mohan Parasaran to file an affidavit by March 29 on all these issues.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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