Yet another attempt to distort the Gujarat Growth Story falls flat

By Akshay Bhatia, Ahmedabad, 5 February 2014

Just like a drowning man clutches at a straw, the Congress Party leaders in the last few days of power are virtually using anything & everything they can get hold of to try & defame the Gujarat Model of development. In their desperation, they do not even care to check the veracity of their facts before attacking the Gujarat Government.

A small ill-researched news report was it all took for Congress heavy-weights to hold press conferences and lambast the Gujarat Government. But what they did not do was to think where the blame for the poverty line lies. The blame for the ill defined poverty lines lies totally with the Central Government for inaccurate and implausible poverty lines. The sad part is that the State Governments have no other option, but to follow the communications from the Centre.

An article in the Times of India tries to dwell into this matter, but it misses some important points.

It is true that the Planning Commission has appointed many committees, like Lakdawala Committee, Tendulkar Committee, Hashmi Committee and lastly Rangrajan Committee, and some of these committees have also given their report suggesting the threshold income limits for poverty estimation. But unfortunately clarity does not exist whether any of these recommendations have been officially accepted and adopted by the Planning Commission for official purposes.

In fact in 2010, the then Food & Civil Supplies Minister of Gujarat, Shri Narottambhai Patel had requested the then central minister of Food &Public Distribution, Shri Sharad Pawar to increase the allocation of food grains to Gujarat for 32 lakhs families instead of 21 lakhs as being given and this request was based on poverty estimation as per Tendulkar Committee’s recommendation. But this request was not accepted clearly showing that Govt. of India had not adopted Tendulkar Committee’s recommendation of the poverty line incomes.

Similarly Shri RP Gupta, Principal Secretary, Food, Civil Supplies & Consumer Affairs Department in Gujarat says “There is no communication whether the NSSO estimates of 2011-12 have been adopted by Planning Commission in the same way as the poverty line income figures of 1999 – 2000 were conveyed through it’s own letter.”

It is intriguing now as to what is the meaning of this exercise of estimating poverty, if the figures are not even communicated with the states. Is this exercise by of estimating only to score political browny points? Should we not use this data to help the poor?

The other part regarding center allocating subsidized food grains under PDS based on Planning Commission estimates of poor in a state and leaves the determination of guidelines and identification to the states, it this very fact which gives rise to distortions & difference in the figures of poor in a state. When some criteria are adopted for estimation of number of poor by Planning Commission and used to arrive at a number, and the states not being able to apply the same criteria (as these may be too complex to be administered or simply not being conveyed), the states resort to other criteria. It is but natural that other set of criteria would not yield the same number. This is precisely what happened in 2004.

Gujarat adopted the BPL list prepared by Rural Development Department containing 21 lakh families in 2004 with a score below 16. This criteria being asset based naturally left out many families whose income was less 2004 poverty income limit and were required to be assisted by inclusion of income criteria also. These families having income less than the threshold income of 2004 would definitely be earning much more now but have been continued as BPL ration – card holders nevertheless.

The crux of the issue is that distortions come when Centre, instead of defining in clear terms the guidelines and criteria for BPL, determines the number only and asks the states to determine their own criteria to arrive at that number. It is this distortion which gives rise to such avoidable controversies.

Unfortunately, the very same thing is happening with the much touted Food Security Bill. Here too, the Centre has unilaterally fixed the number of beneficiaries while leaving the complicated & cumbersome task of identifying the beneficiaries.

This clearly underlines that the sole focus of the Central Government is to grab headlines and credit for massive spending on welfare programs. It is state governments like Gujarat which are actually helping the poor by helping an additional 11 lakh people unaddressed by the Central Government.

The author can be followed on Twitter at @AkshayBhatia01

Also read:Centre issued criteria for identifying BPL families for issuing ration card in 2004 and has not revised since then