The Below the Poverty Line (BPL) census, approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday, will be an exercise in identifying households that will fit the bill within the poverty cap of 46 per cent of the rural population of India.
The identification of the 46 per cent poverty cap, estimated by the Planning Commission, will be done through a set of automatic exclusion and automatic inclusion criteria, and the remaining households will be classified through seven assigned deprivation indicators.
The same process will be adopted for the urban population as well, but the poverty cap to qualify for social benefits during the 12th Five Year Plan will be decided later by the Planning Commission and the Union government.Union Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said the headcount would start on June 30 and be completed by December as per the criteria decided.
With the modifications of the Saxena Committee recommendations, the preferential treatment to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has been scaled down, while Muslims have been left out of this treatment.
The Ministry has accepted four suggestions from the Saxena Committee and one from the National Advisory Council (NAC) headed by Sonia Gandhi — households without shelter; the destitute or those living on alms; primitive tribal groups; legally released bonded labourers; and manual scavengers.The factors include for BPL:
households with only one room with kucha walls and roof; households with no adult member between 16 and 59 years of age; female-headed household with no adult male; households with a disabled member; households with no able-bodied adult member; SC and ST households with no literate adult above 25 years of age; and landless households deriving a major part of their income from manual casual labour.
Based on these factors they give marks for the families from 0 - 7The family with 7 marks will be given more preference in welfare activites
The factors exclude for BPL:
owning at least one two-wheeler; a fishing board; three-wheeler mechanised agricultural equipment; a kisan credit card with a limit of Rs. 50,000; 2.5 acre irrigated land with one irrigation equipment; having government employment; earnings of more than Rs.10,000 per month; and paying income tax.
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