Experts questioned the authenticity and robustness of the new socio-economic census released on Friday, saying the data was neither validated nor discussed at the village level.
Experts questioned the authenticity and robustness of the new socio-economic census released on Friday, saying the data was neither validated nor discussed at the village level.
They also feared states could interpret the deprivation index as per their convenience, leaving the data at the national level facetious.
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Former Planning Commission secretary NC Saxena, who was involved in past efforts to formulate the criteria for identifying the poor, said one-thirds of the really poor were not included in the list when a similar exercise was conducted in 2002.
“No objections were invited and no open house at the village level was done. It raises (an) issue over (the) robustness of the data collected,” said Biraj Patnaik of the Right To Food campaign.
Already, activists have cited an anomaly in the census data.
Saxena said as per the census there were 16.50 lakh households in rural India living in abject poverty (destitute, those without homes, beggars and primitive tribal groups) but the government was providing enhanced subsidised food under the Antodaya scheme to about 20 lakh households.
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According to estimates by activists based on the social sector services provided by the government there should had been least 2.5 crore households under the category of most vulnerable.
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According to estimates by activists based on the social sector services provided by the government there should had been least 2.5 crore households under the category of most vulnerable.
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Patnaik also said the census could pose a problem for mapping urban poverty as it failed to take into account the migrating communities. The 2002 below poverty line census had migration as a parameter to identify poverty.
Rural development minister Birendra Singh, however, said the SECC was “very authentic” as about 96 lakh objections about the criteria were received which had been rectified.
“We have corrected at least 97% of the faults pointed out,” Singh said.
More objections could be raised in the coming months as research begins into the data.
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The erstwhile Planning Commission, which has been replaced by the NITI Aayog, had found several anomalies in the last BPL census conducted during the last NDA regime, including the fact that half of the population in some urban areas had been identified as poor.
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.
