BPL criteria – Need for reassessment?

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

As per the  2011-12 report of the planning commission, people spending less than Rs 27.2 per day in villages and Rs 33.33 in urban areas were considered poor. As per the estimates, poverty rate declined 2.18 percentage points in each year between 2004-05 and 2011-12, against an average 0.74 percentage points a year in the 10-year period between 1993-94 and 2004-05.Due to this reason, India’s poverty line is sometimes called the ‘starvation line’ since this income based poverty line considers the bare minimum income to provide food and does not account for education and healthcare.

The $1.25 level set by the World Bank is taken as the poverty line globally. The rupee’s value against the dollar averaged 47.85 in 2011-12. The purchasing power parity (PPP) rate for the rupee against the dollar could be arrived at by dividing the average exchange rate by 2.55. So, at the 2011-12 exchange rate of Rs 47.85 a dollar, the PPP rate would be Rs 18.76. The $1.25 poverty line at that PPP rate would mean Rs 23.45 — less than India’s poverty line for both rural and urban areas as announced for 2011-12.

By 2011, the financial burden on the government increased by Rs 80 crores to Rs 100 crore a month since 44 percent of the total 60 million BPL cards are with households that did not need them as per the criteria. The questionnaire administered had only seven questions. It has a 0-7 score, with seven denoting the most poor. Questionnaire also had an automatic inclusion and exclusion category along with the ranking criteria. Based on the ranking it was identified that inclusion criteria was very narrow due to which large mass of the rural poor will not be marked poor and questions to a certain extent also did not reflect actual conditions.

So, taking into consideration the given situation there is an urgent need to reconsider the criteria that has been defined for setting the BPL (below poverty line) and reassess the questions that are asked to collect responses based on which the number of poor people are decided. So far, data reflect that number of people below BPL have declined. However, with such low BPL value defined there is a possibility that we are missing out on a large population of people who are waiting for help and assistance.