For our purposes, it will suffice to mention the measures adopted by the Planning Commission in recent years to identify the families Below the Poverty Line. We refer to the measures employed while drafting the Tenth Plan (2002–07).
In its Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002–07) survey, BPL for rural areas was based on the degree of deprivation with respect to 13 parameters, with scores from 0 to 4. These parameters include landholding, type of house, clothing, food security, sanitation, consumer durables, literacy status, labour force, means of livelihood, status of children, type of indebtedness, reasons for migrations, etc. Accordingly, families scoring less than 15 marks out of the maximum 52 were classified as BPL; a total of 3.18 lakh rural families were thus identified as below the poverty line.
For urban areas, BPL was based on the degree of deprivation with respect to seven parameters: roof, floor, water, sanitation, education level, type of employment, and status of children in a house. A total of 1.25 lakh urban families were identified as BPL in 2004.
The Planning Commission gave the state governments the freedom to adopt any criteria for state-level schemes. The Government of Kerala was one of the few state governments which formulated its own criteria. It selected nine parameters and any family which lacked access to four or more of them was classified as BPL.
The nine parameters for urban areas adopted by the state of Kerala are:
- No land
- No house or dilapidated house
- No latrine and poor sanitation
- Family without colour television
- No family member in any regular employment
- No access to safe drinking water
- Women-headed household or presence of widows or divorcee
- Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST)—socially disadvantaged groups
- Mentally retarded or disabled member in the family
For rural areas, the Kerala government used eight of the above-mentioned nine parameters, substituting the colour television criterion with ‘family with an illiterate adult member’.
In the Eleventh Plan (2007–12), BPL was used to work out the Headcount Ratio (HCR), which is the percentage of the people below the poverty line. The Plan document states that ‘Between 1973 and 1983, the HCR of the poor had declined from 54.9% to 44.5%, and it fell further to 36% in 1993–94 and to 27.5% by 2004–05’. The details are given in Table 16.2.
Table 16.2 People Below Poverty Line in India
Source: Eleventh Five Year Plan. Tables 4.1 and 4.2 merged.
The poverty Line is intended to separate those who fall below it—the absolutely poor—from the relatively poor who are measured in relation to the incomes of the rest of society …. This second term also suggests the political relevance of income inequality in the economy and may suggest income redistribution policies rather than direct interventions, as in the case of the absolutely poor.8
In other words, the approach for the absolutely poor is welfarist—just another name for charity. It is the strategy addressed to the relatively poor that requires a shift in policy with regard to income re-distribution. Welfarist policies are often described as policies of positive discrimination. When translated into action programmes, such policies tend to become policies of negative discrimination against those who do not belong to the category of the poor or the backward. This happens when the criterion of caste overwhelms the criterion of BPL. The poor who do not belong to the two schedules adopted by the government, or to the list of ever enlarging Backward Classes are denied all help despite their being deserving of special privileges. It is to rectify this, and in response to the rising demand, that the Indian government set up a Commission for the identification of backward classes among the non-OBC section of society. Here again, while the word ‘classes’ is used, the effort is being made to identify the castes and not the families that would qualify as poor and deserving—an approach that is sociologically untenable.
The concept ‘poor’ is an analytical construct. The poor, for all government programmes, are defined by the official machinery, and these definitions vary from time to time, and even from State to State. Those who constitute the category of the poor come from varying backgrounds and are scattered throughout the country and in different castes and religions. Thus, ‘the poor’ are a category in the same sense as the ‘farmers’, ‘the youth’,‘the workers’ or ‘the women’ are a category and not a social group.
Official statements and economic analyses hint, however, on the basis of available statistics that poverty in India is being reduced. According to the Planning Commission, rural poverty is getting concentrated in agricultural labour and artisanal households and urban poverty in casual labour households. It also suggests a high concentration of poverty in the SC and ST groups. The important point to be noted is that a poverty profile is prepared on the basis of data from the families, and analysis shows that poverty is found both in rural and urban areas and in developed and backward states. Families that are classified as BPL are distributed in several castes, both lower and upper. It suggests that poverty exists at the level of the family, and also that not all families that belong to SC, ST, and OBC categories qualify as BPL. There are families which do not belong to these categories and yet are listed in the BPL category. Since a high concentration of such families is found among the SCs, STs, and OBCs, special priorities are given to them.
The fact that poverty is on the decline has been noted by several scholars. However, some have argued that its reduction in percentage terms should not be taken to mean that the absolute numbers of the poor are on a decline. Also, with the acknowledgement of poverty in countries of Eastern Europe, a significant number of the poor has been added to the world total, which has affected not only the absolute numbers, but also the percentage of the poor. Moreover, the specific character of poverty in the former Soviet Block requires a redesigning of the paradigm for poverty analysis and restructuring of strategies to combat poverty.
In a recent article, Gurcharan Das9 has argued that blaming economic development for social evils is not a valid proposition. To quote: ‘More people on the earth have risen out of poverty in the last 25 years than at any other time in human history, and this has happened because of sustained high economic growth in India and China.’ He refers to the work of Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion to say that ‘India’s high economic growth since 1991 is, indeed, pro-poor and has decidedly reduced poverty’. Employing a new series of consumption-based poverty measures from 1950 to 2006, and reviewing the findings of 47 rounds of National Sample Surveys (NSS), these authors showed that ‘slightly more than one person in two lived below the poverty line in India during the 1950s and ’60s. By 1990, this had fallen to one person in three. By 2005, it fell again, and only one in five persons now lives below the poverty line.’
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