Slugfest continues over backwardness

The Centre’s bid to keep Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar in good humour has received a setback with a new government report coming up with a definition of backwardness in total variance with the Raghuram Rajan committee report.

Updated on: Oct 22, 2013, 01:19:30 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Centre’s bid to keep Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar in good humour has received a setback with a new government report coming up with a definition of backwardness in total variance with the Raghuram Rajan committee report.

The government had constituted Rajan committee to measure backwardness among different states to ensure bigger flow of the central funds to the states on index of backwardness. The committee had ranked Odisha as most backward followed by Bihar on basis of production, income and gross domestic product.

Now, a Planning Commission committee of members Mihir Shah and Abhijit Sen had ranked 365 districts on backwardness using a totally different parameter. The committee opted for seven variables derived from 2011 census including scheduled caste, schedule tribe population, literacy rate and household with access to electricity, drinking water and banking facility for the ranking.

“We think that the better way to measure backwardness is through population parameters and not consumption,” said a senior plan panel functionary. “Rajan committee ranked Bihar lower than Odisha on backwardness even though the former’s GDP is less than the latter.”

The Mihir-Abhijit committee report may throw a spanner in pushing the finance ministry’s constituted Rajan committee recommendations as its analysis are more detailed.

While the panel says its recommendations are limited to restructuring of Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF), it admitted that implementing the Rajan mechanism would be difficult. Three states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal — have already opposed Rajan committee.

The panel believes that Mihir-Abhijit committee formula will not result in reduction in allocation for states such as Bihar under BRGF but would result in more money for extreme backward blocks. In all, 365 districts should get money under new BRGF, of which 222 would be fully covered, the committee recommended.

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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