Identification of BPL Households for Poverty Alleviation Programmes

Identification of BPL Households for Poverty Alleviation Programmes INDIRA HIRWAY The latest expert group on identification of households below poverty line submitted its report to the ministry of rural development in August 2002 [GOI 2002]. Following the recommendations of this report, a fresh BPL census is to be initiated in rural India. K Sundaram has commented on the futility of conducting such a survey on the grounds that: (1) the survey methodology suffers from more or less the same weaknesses as the earlier methodology recommended by the 1997 BPL survey, (2) there are serious problems with respect to indicators, scores, aggregation of scores and operationalisation of the scores for identifying the poor, and (3) the ranking of households based on aggregate scores on 13 indicators is virtually useless for implementation monitoring and evaluation of anti-poverty programmes, as this kind of ranking of households is either not needed (for wage employment programmes) or is useless (for self-employment programmes) [Sundaram 2003].