By IANS,
New Delhi: The methodology for the below poverty line (BPL) census will be based on an automatic inclusion and exclusion criteria and deprivation scores for the remaining households, officials said Thursday.
Rural development ministry officials said that the ministry had made some modifications in the methodology suggested by the N.C. Saxena committee to identify the poor based on the pilot survey it had conducted in different parts of the country.
According to the note considered by the government Thursday, the criteria for automatic exclusion includes:
* Households owning motorised two wheelers, three wheerlers, four wheelers or fishing boats which require registeration
* Households owning mechanised three or four wheeler agricutural equipment such as tractors and harvesters
* Households with a Kisan Credit Card with credit limit of Rs.50,000 and above
* Households with any member as a government employee or gazetted or non-gazetted employees of central government, state government, public sector undertaking, government aided autonomous bodies and local bodies
* Households with enterprises registered with the government for any purpose
* Households with any member of the family earning more than Rs.10,000 per month
* Households paying income tax or professional tax or with three or more rooms with permanent walls.
* Households owning landline phones or a refrigerator or 2.5 acres or more of irrigated land with at least one irrigation equipment such as a borewell or tubewell
* Households with five acres or more irrigated land for two or more crop seasons.
The criteria for automatic inclusion includes destitutes without shelter and those living on alms, manual scavengers, primitive tribal groups and legally released bonded labourers.
For the remaining households, the survey will be conducted on a 10-point score using several socio-economic indicators.
The ministry officials said that poverty estimates were made by the Planning Commission, which had estimated that 41.8 percent of the country’s rural population was poor. They said four percent people were estimated to be living in transient poverty.
“Our job is to find who are these poor,” a senior ministry official said.