Income not the only criteria to fix BPL: Experts

CHENNAI: Income alone should not be the lone criteria and the government should include social vulnerability, gender, access to basic amenities like clean water and good environment as indicators of poverty, according to experts.Slamming the UPA government for coming out with figures that spending more than Rs 32 per day and Rs 26 per day in urban and rural areas respectively, would not entitle anyone to come under the government’s BPL scheme, Supreme Court advisor on Food Security V Suresh alleged that it was a calculated move by the United Progressive Alliance government to deny the reality of poverty in India and come out with artificial figures.“They tried the same thing three months ago by fixing Rs 15 per day in rural areas and Rs 20 per day in urban areas as the poverty line.Now they have repeated it.It is a cruel joke and robs the poor of dignity and is in violation of the Directive Principles of State Policy,” he said.Ossie Fernandes, Director, The Human Rights Advocacy and Research Foundation (HRF), and Balasundar of the Citizen Rights Forum said that income was not lone a criteria to determine poverty.“The government should include social vulnerability, gender, access to basic amenities like clean water and good environment as indicators of poverty,” they concluded.Suresh said that the government was slowly trying to do away with the social security scheme by dismantling the public distribution system and giving cash credit, which was an agenda of the World Bank.He said the figures arrived at by the Planning Commission were “fit enough for pigs to live.” “The Suresh Tendulkar Committee report has identified 38 per cent of the population as poor.The current figures by the Planning Commission underestimated the M C Saxena report and Arjun Sen Gupta report, which the UPA government never wants to acknowledge.This is a cruel joke by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia,” he said.“Such measures will reduce the young population, which is the asset of the country, to be stunted and wasted, besidses blowing a big hole in the economy by spending on medical bills,” Suresh added.