Plan panel tweaks norms to dodge spl status demands

To check ‘political’ demands for special status, the Planning Commission has devised new deprivation norms based on Census data to allocate funds for poorest panchayats of India in the 12 plan. Chetan Chauhan reports. New deprivation index

Updated on: Apr 7, 2012, 13:21:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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To check ‘political’ pressure for special status, the Planning Commission has devised new deprivation norms based on census data to allocate funds for poorest panchayats of India in the 12 plan (2012-17).

Chief ministers of Bihar Nitish Kumar and West Bengal Mamata Banerjee have been demanding special status for their states on the grounds of backwardness. The Centre had announced special packages for Bundelkhand and Vidarbha on political demand, rather than any norms. "Giving money to states on ad-hoc basis has been futile," said plan panel member Mihir Shah.

To end this, the panel has identified blocks (a group of panchayats) depending on the level of deprivation and multi-dimensional poverty. Instead, of the National Sample Survey Office data used to estimate poverty in India, the plan panel has taken census data of 2011 into consideration to list these blocks. "The advantage of census data is that it covers all households whereas NSS is a sample survey," a panel official said.

Unlike the controversial Tendulkar Committee methodology to estimate poverty in India, the panel has used a bigger basket of aggregates to identify the poor. Apart from daily consumption, school and health centre employed by Tendulkar, the panel has identified the blocks on indicators such as transport connectivity, electricity, communication, irrigation, banking facility and social status of local population taken from the Census. "Blocks having higher concentration of scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and other backward classes (OBCs) were listed higher on the deprivation index," an official explained.

The index is based on the premise that deprivation levels are highest among STs followed by SCs and OBCs especially in flood-prone areas. It also has two other elements — availability of irrigation and whether the area is flood-prone or not.

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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