State government estimates of the number of below poverty line families in rural areas is likely to go down sharply.
Thus fewer families will be eligible for the benefits of poverty alleviation programmes in the Tenth Five-Year Plan than in the earlier one.
The rural development ministry, which is in charge of these programmes, has changed the rules for identification of BPL families.
Not only this, it has also stipulated that the number of BPL families identified by states on the basis of the BPL Census 2002 cannot exceed the 1999-2000 BPL estimates of the Planning Commission by more than 10 per cent.
This may lead to problems because Planning Commission and state government estimates of the number of BPL families have varied sharply in the past.
The BPL Census conducted in 1997 had said 41.05 per cent of the total number of families in the country were BPL families.
But, the 1999-2000 Planning Commission estimates had put the number of poor persons in rural areas at 27.09 per cent of the total population. In terms of households in the BPL category, this was much less than the BPL Census estimates.
However, this will not affect the fund allocation to various states. This is because funds are not decided on the basis of BPL Census results, but on a formula adopted by the National Development Council. The formula takes into account the estimates of poverty obtained by the Planning Commission.
The rural development ministry has discontinued the earlier process of using income or expenditure as parameters for identifying the poor.
Now, it has simplified the process to take into account various socio-economic indicators of rural households.
The ministry has listed 13 questions which will be put to all rural households in the country. The responses will be marked on a scale of 0 to 4, with the total score ranging from 0 to 52.
States will have the freedom to decide on the cut-off scores to identify the households as 'very poor', 'poor', 'not so poor' or 'non-poor'.
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