-The Times of India
If you have a kutcha house or have a tarpaulin to cover youself, the socio-caste survey will not consider you homeless. If a farmer has a hand-pump provided by the government or a kisan patra to take loans against that, the same BPL scheme could now disqualify him from a BPL card.
If a widow has a 16 year-old son, she may end up losing the BPL status because the child is defined as an adult – even though MNREGA refuses to engage those below 18 years. If you have two rooms instead of one in your kutcha house, you could also lose out the BPL status.
The Right to Food (RTF) campaign on Monday brought out these glaring examples of the failure of the new Socio-Economic Caste Survey to demand a universal PDS instead of a targeted approach as planned by UPA.
Claiming that the survey would leave several lakh rightful claimants outside the new BPL list, the RTF campaign will gather a 1,000 such ‘zero scorepati’ people in Delhi on Tuesday, demanding that government needs to clarify on selection of beneficiaries before it considers the National Food Security bill.
"The criteria being used to identify the poor under the survey are dubious and the food bill is a blunder," said National Advisory Council member jean Dreze addressing the media here on Monday.
"How can the food bill be enacted without knowing the criteria for selecting the beneficiaries," he said. "It’s like putting the cart before the horse," he added.
Earlier, the Planning Commission and the rural development ministry had announced that it would dispense with the artificial poverty-line based cut-off for beneficiaries of the proposed food security bill. They had said the survey would be used as the basis for the identification of the poor, and set up a committee to finalize it. But Dreze and his colleagues pointed out that even as such glaring lacunae continued to exist, the survey had begun in several states like Rajasthan and Orissa and completed in some like Tripura.
Another member of the RTF campaign said the Union rural development ministry had been insensitive when approached with the problems in the survey, and had given ‘non-answers’ to its pointed interventions even as the exercise continued.