Northern, western states for delinking poverty line from sops

After the South, states from northern and western regions have agreed to use the poverty line for tracking the progress of welfare schemes rather than for identifying the beneficiaries.
At the second regional consultation meeting of a NITI Aayog's Task Force, the states agreed with the think tank's view that poverty line should be used for tracking progress in poverty reduction and not for identification of poor to provide benefits under welfare schemes, NITI Aayog said in statement.
Earlier, southern states had expressed the same view in their meeting with the taskforce held on April 19 at Hyderabad.
The agreement reflected views of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, and UTs of Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli in their meeting with the NITI Aayog's Task Force on Elimination of Poverty in India held in Jaipur today.

According to statement, Gujarat opined that poverty is a multidimensional concept and shared its life cycle and area based approach to be followed to combat poverty.
Gujarat briefed about some of its best practices which have been successful in addressing the poverty in the state such as Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojana, Sagarkhedu Sarvangi Vikas Yojana, Krishi Mahotsava and Garib Kalyan Mela.

One of the innovative model worth consideration for replicating in other states was that of rehabilitation of slum dwellers. This has reduced slum population drastically from 2001 to 2011 in Gujarat.
Maharashtra flagged managerial issues of MGNREGS. It
opined that there should be common MIS for all rural development schemes addressing poverty to leverage optimal resource utilisation, the statement said.

Rajasthan highlighted that its communitisation has brought paradigm shift in poverty alleviation wherein all interventions in Rajeevika are led by women resource persons from the community.
Rajasthan stressed that capacity development at least to block level functionaries need urgent attention as large amount of resources are being dealt at this level.
Haryana is adopting Poly house model to boosting the productivity of exotic flowers and vegetables in view of small land holdings. This is helping farmers to move away from water intensive paddy crop in the state.
The participating states particularly Maharashtra and Rajasthan wanted the issue of watershed development to be looked into and some remedial measures on availability of drinking water may be taken up by NITI Aayog.

All the states raised concern over quality of education in government schools.
At the first meeting of the governing council held on February 8, 2015, it was decided to constitute a task force on elimination of poverty in India under the chairmanship of NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya. It was also decided that each state will constitute parallel task forces on poverty elimination as well.