BPL panel baffled over 'vow' to include SC/STs, Muslims

Union rural development minister C P Joshi’s announcement that the government had decided to classify all scheduled castes and tribes and minorities as eligible for Below Poverty Line (BPL) benefits on the basis of the official recommendations of the committee in this regard has baffled the latter.

This committee was chaired by former Planning Commission secretary N C Saxena. And, its members noted they had made no such recommendation.

Saxena is categorical: “We have not said SC/ST and Muslims must be automatically included. We have only given them weightage,” he said.

Santosh Mehrotra, one of the panel members, told Business Standard that Joshi had misread the recommendations and was playing politics with the BPL identification criteria.

Said Saxena: “The minister may not have been properly briefed. I don’t think they will make such sweeping changes.”

As for Joshi, his reaction to a query in this regard was that the option stated by him was under consideration and not yet final. He had made the original remarks to journalists at the recent Social Editors Conference.

The Saxena panel had criticised “the method followed in the 2002 BPL census, comprising exclusion of people on the basis of their possessions like pucca houses, vehicle, more than two pairs of clothes” and so on.

“We never asked for automatic inclusion of Muslims or minorities or SC or ST ,” says Mehrotra. The report is very clear on who should be automatically included. These are: ‘Primitive Tribal Groups’ ; the most discriminated-against SC groups, called ‘Maha Dalit Groups’, if so identified by the state; single women, alone or those with no major son; households with a disabled person as the bread-earner; a household headed by a minor; destitute households dependent predominantly on alms for survival; homeless households; and,if any member of the household is a bonded labourer

On SCs, STs and Muslims, the report gives them a higher ranking for deciding the BPL inclusion. On a scale of 10, landless agricultural labour gets the highest mark of four, followed by three marks for SCs and STs, two marks for Most Backward Castes, and one mark for Muslims and OBCs. There is no mention of minorities. So, if a Muslim is also a landless labourer, he has a better chance of getting included in the BPL list than one who owns land.