The income limit for households for qualifying as a beneficiary under the BPL (below poverty line) list has been pegged at about Rs. 27,000 per annum, according to the methodology approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday.
A household with an annual earning of more than Rs. 27,000 will stand excluded from the BPL list. This is what the automatic exclusion and automatic inclusion criteria and the seven deprivation indicators are supposed to aim at.
The upper limit has been arrived at by allowing five earning persons in a household with a per capita monthly income of about Rs. 447 per month in the rural areas, which works out roughly to Rs. 2,,250 per month per household.
Both Union Minister of Rural Development Vilasrao Deshmukh and Union Minister of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Kumari Shelja ruled out any major change in the methodology approved by the Cabinet. The issue of placing a poverty cap on the BPL list would not in any way affect the enumeration process. Mr. Deshmukh clarified that the issue was sub judice as it was pending before the Supreme Court and the actual facts gathered would be matched with the cap figure.
The Centre is working to frame procedures to allow anyone to appeal against the BPL list or the caste census for a better statistical understanding of numerical caste population of the country. The two lists will be pasted at each gram sabha for the purpose.
While the individual caste and religious affiliations would not be made public, the list would however specify the caste composition of the village or gram sabha and so on right up to the national level presenting the numerical caste enumeration of the country.
With the entire exercise based on self-declaration, the government will neither go for certification nor allow a public scrutiny of the caste census. The job is being performed for the Registrar General of India.
Each one is likely to get the AADHAR UID number as and when the gathered information is correlated with the inputs of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and its system.
