An endless loop

An endless loop

“Delayed Justice” poignantly captures how the Forest Rights Act, in spite of being a radical one on paper, is seriously flawed in implementation… Filmmaker Shriprakash talks about his documentary to Meena Menon.

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The film shows how the letter and spirit of the Act may never be fulfilled.

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Tracking government's performance: Director Shriprakash with his cast and crew.

At the end of award-winning filmmaker Shriprakash's documentary, one of the adivasis interviewed makes a simple demand, “I want my patta (title deed),” he says, before setting out into the deep forest. “Delayed Justice” is more than a film on the implementation of The Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006. It gives you an idea of the life of the forest dwelling communities, in this case in Andhra Pradesh, and their alienation from the rest of the world.

The purpose of the film was to document how the Act is being implemented. The Act is a radical one in Indian history and the film tackles how it is being implemented in all the regions of Andhra Pradesh (AP). “I chose AP because on the surface it had a pretty good track record,” says Shriprakash. Made in 2009, it is part of an ongoing research on the Act and produced by the University of East Anglia. “I thought AP is one of the few states where there is some governance but I found in the remote areas where I filmed, Marripalam for instance, things are the same,” he says. “If this Act cannot be properly implemented in a state like Andhra I wonder what is happening to it in the rest of the country,” he adds.

The law is tough and is the essence of democracy but the film exposes how the Panchayat Raj institutions are not doing their job. There is no confidence among the adivasis that they will be the rightful owners of their land. The forest tribes find themselves in a curious position. Till yesterday they were vilified for destroying the forest, and hey presto, now there's an act giving them land titles.

Stark portrayal

The film shows how the letter and spirit of the Act may never be fulfilled. The Act could impact future land allocations and community rights, feels the filmmaker. But is allotting forest land to the adivasis the only way out? They have been denied so many basic amenities, they are all unskilled in the real sense of the word and how can they fit into the global economy? Giving rights is not the only answer, one of the government officers says in the film, unless it is backed by other facilities like education.

The plight of the Chenchu and Gonds is enunciated in a simple sentence. One of the villagers says he doesn't even have a cot to sleep on. In some cases, land claimed by the people has plantations by the forest department over their traditional graveyards, and now the government is refusing those claims. “Things have not changed, the system always finds an excuse,” remarks Shriprakash. In one part of the forest in a tiger reserve near Pedacheru, local people caught poachers who trapped a tiger. “Did the forest guards catch them? No we did and they can't give us a small piece of land which is rightfully ours,” says one angry man. Chenchu women stand on the road for hours selling wild honey and they trudge for miles to collect forest produce.

The Chenchus of the Nallamalla forest of Rayalaseema climb steep rocks to hunt for honey, sometimes after two hours they return empty handed. They are a people still using bows and arrows and surviving off the forest. Government officials explain how the adivasis have been cut off from their own lands due to the exigencies of the market and timber smuggling. The sense of community ownership is strong among the adivasis and Sedam Arju, a Gond intellectual, lists out nature's treasures and how his clan tree is teak and how it is worshipped. “The Aryans ruined our culture,” he says. The Gonds, like most tribes, are animistic, they worship nature. Villagers in west Godavari live off hill brooms, grass and shikakai which the forest provides them. “We pray to the forest deities before our work,” says one man.

The usual impediments

The implementation of the Act seems fraught with red tape. A series of committees starting from the village level have to be formed to accept claims and process them. The Forest Rights Committee (FRC) needs to know the Act which as the film shows is not always the case. Some government officials seems meticulous, some are clueless. In some villages people are vague about the Act and what they are entitled to. The “social mobilisers” appointed to inform people about the Act have no rapport with locals. Illiterate adivasis are roped into a mire of form filling, submitting claims, and relying on the forest department to survey their land, which may not always be accurate.

In some places the surveyors are adivasis, so that there is no injustice. The film also raises questions on people who have been displaced for an irrigation project over 30 years ago from a village called Pedacheru in Prakasam district. Though they have been rehabilitated elsewhere, over 70 Chenchu families who could not survive there came back to stay there. The government says these people have been rehabilitated once, so the Act cannot apply to them and now they face dislocation again. So many Chenchu have died as a result of this back and forth movement.

In Marripalam village, which is six km from a road-head into the forest, the head of the FRC is confused about the number of claims from the area. Forest officials caught on hidden camera clearly voice their opinion against the Act and also add that the department is involved in large-scale timber smuggling.

Till the middle of 2009 the people of Marripalam were still struggling for their rights, while the people of Pedacheru face another displacement. The government received over 3.2 lakh claims of which the bulk was rejected. However, till August 2009, 1,24,652 titles were distributed.

For the wretched of our earth

For the wretched of our earth

HARSH MANDER

The new draft of the Food Security Act 2010 doesn't go far enough to see that the most needy get adequate food and nutrition. In fact, it promises much less than what is currently covered under the PDS system.

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This is ominous, as it may well pave the way for eventually substituting the Public Distribution System (PDS) with cash transfers

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Photo: Ashoke Chakraborty

Hunger: Still a depressing reality for many...

A lthough the ravages of famines which decimated tens of thousands of lives are relegated to history, hunger still haunts millions of dispossessed homes and city streets across this land. State granaries are full, the economy is resurgent and many of the world's wealthiest people are Indians. Yet, one in every two Indian children is unable to access enough food for her body and brain to develop to their full potential. There is little more desperate and shaming for a parent than to be unable to feed one's child. In many homes — hidden in the shadows of our newly accumulated wealth — men and women carry on their shoulders the burden of suffering and mortification of this want, many days every year. They cut back on their own intake of food from three meals to two, and from two to one. They still have to labour strenuously to survive; they wilt and age rapidly, or succumb to curable ailments.

Countries much poorer than India — in our neighbourhood as well as in the poorest regions of Africa — have fared far better in battling hunger and malnourishment. Governments in India procure and distribute millions of tons of subsidised food, run feeding centres for children, and feed a hundred and forty million students daily in schools. Yet, they fail to stem the wasting of the bodies — and spirit — of millions of our people. Official surveys admit that in an entire decade, the percentage of malnourished children has reduced by just one percentage point, from 47 to 46 per cent.

Therefore, the pledge by the UPA government to enact a food security bill carried within it the rare potential of actually altering the destinies of masses of India's poorest women and men, boys and girls. In a country which has both the resources and the food to end want among all its people, the stubborn persistence of hunger and malnutrition amounts to a spectacular — and culpable — failure of governance. Today reports of starvation from many corners of the country are brushed away only with hot denials by public officials. They do nothing to alter the diminishing daily search for food — through back-breaking underpaid toil, debt bondage, distress migration, foraging or begging — which constitutes the reality of millions of our people. It is this that the law can change.

Disappointed

I hoped, therefore, to see enacted a law which creates binding obligations on public officials to reach sufficient food to every resident of this vast land, and hold them gravely accountable for failures to do so. Instead, all that the draft Bill prepared by the Ministry headed by Sharad Pawar and approved by the Group of Ministers contains, as emerges from news reports, is a legal obligation jointly on the Central and State governments, to supply 25 kg of subsidised rice or wheat a month to families deemed by governments to live below the ‘poverty-line'. Failure to reach this quota of food grain to these poor families would entitle them to a food security allowance.

The proposed law adds nothing whatsoever to impoverished people's rights and access to sufficient food for an active and healthy life. In fact, it actually reduces these entitlements. The existing Public Distribution System already provides for moresubsidised food grain per poor household than the proposed law: 35 kg against the 25 kg promised in the law. This already has the force of law, through directions by the Supreme Court that governments cannot reduce the supply or raise prices of subsidised food grain. Many state governments cover much larger populations than the quotas of people deemed by the Planning Commission to be poor, and supply them grain at lower prices than proposed under the law.

All that is new in the law is the assurance of a cash allowance if governments do not supply the food grain. But this is ominous, as it may well pave the way for eventually substituting the Public Distribution System (PDS) with cash transfers, as is already being advocated vigorously in several official and non-governmental forums. But many studies have established that food is far more likely to actually reach the mouths of children and women in a household than cash in the hands of the male adult family head. And PDS is not just about supplying food to consumers; it involves guaranteeing a floor price to farmers for their produce, and stabilising prices by moving food grain to scarcity areas. The erosion of PDS through systems of cash transfers would further undermine food security by failing to guarantee a remunerative price to farming households, many of whom are among the most food insecure people in the country, and by diluting price stabilisation capacities of governments.

The law also does nothing to address the many near-fatal problems with the design and implementation of PDS today. Systems of identifying India's poor are seriously flawed, and many studies show that they leave out many of our most impoverished people. The official estimates of numbers of poor people, which form the basis of quotas of subsidised food grain available under PDS, are contested and vary widely, which further reduces the actual reach of cheap food to those who most need it. People are malnourished not just because they lack cereals, but also proteins and fat; but the PDS does not incorporate pulses and oil. There is nothing in the law to convince us that corruption and leakages that typically characterise PDS will be addressed, such as by eliminating private traders and entrusting Panchayats with running PDS and ensuring them realistic margins.

Ominous silence

Even more critically, the PDS is only one of many initiatives through which governments reach food to people. The law is silent about all of these other programmes, and creates no legal guarantees, such as for promoting breast-feeding for infants, pre-school feeding through the ICDS, school feeding programmes, maternity allowances and feeding, and pensions for the aged, single women headed households, and disabled people.

By contrast, the draft bill commended by Congress President Sonia Gandhi to the Prime Minister contained many of these comprehensive guarantees for securing food for infants, children, women, the aged and the infirm. Once these are contained in the law, rather than their current status just as government schemes, governments cannot withdraw or dilute these, and people can go to court against public officials and governments which fail to provide them. This draft also provided for full coverage of various vulnerable groups with highly subsidised rations, such as single women headed households, old and infirm people, the disabled, homeless people, and most disadvantaged tribal and dalit communities.

This alternate draft law went further to create new entitlements for some of the most food insecure people who are not covered by any existing schemes. For instance, school meals cover children who are in school, but the most malnourished children are those who can never enter school. Therefore, for street children, the alternate provides for secure food through residential schools. For urban migrants and homeless people, it provides for community kitchens.

It is often said far too lightly that one decision can sometimes change the course of history. But this is indeed one such decision. For people who have for centuries been condemned to live with the hopeless suffering of hunger, a comprehensive food security bill — which creates detailed obligations for governments to secure food and nutrition for people who live most with want and deprivation, whose lives still remain frozen in time as the rest of us race ahead — can indeed alter the destinies of the most wretched of our earth.

Missing: 42.7 million women

Missing: 42.7 million women

KALPANA SHARMA

Lack of access to healthcare, malnutrition and selective abortion — all these have contributed to over 40 million women dying in India. And these are the issues the government needs to address now…

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In India, women constitute 48.2 per cent of the population, worse than Pakistan...

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Photo: V. Ganesan

A struggle all the way...

Last month, on March 8, we celebrated the centenary of International Women's Day. A day later some celebrated the passage of the Women's Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha while others ranted and raved against it. Still others asked whether 63 years after Independence, any of this made a material difference to the lives of the majority of Indian women.

The latter were, of course, right. Symbolic gestures have little meaning when every year over 40 million Indian women die for no other reason than not being able to access healthcare, if and when they do being discriminated against, being so malnourished that even if they get treatment they cannot survive, and all this only if they are not eliminated before birth or after being born.

Yes, also on March 8, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released its 2010 Asia-Pacific Human Development Report titled, “Voice and Rights: A turning point for gender equality in Asia and the Pacific”. The picture that emerged of India was not a happy one. In most countries, women generally outnumber and outlive men. As a result, they are a little over half the population. But in India, they constitute 48.2 per cent of the population, worse than Pakistan where the situation is bad enough with women being 48.5 per cent of the population. Even Bangladesh is better at 48.8 per cent. The reason this has happened is a combination of the factors that have led to 42.7 million “missing” women (2007 data).

Chilling reminder

As if we needed another reminder, The Economist magazine carried a hard-hitting feature under the headline: “Gendercide – The worldwide war on babies” (March 4, 2010). “Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies”, stated the article as it reported on several Asian countries, particularly India and China and the skewed sex ratio. The article should have been titled “Femicide” as only one gender is being eliminated — the female. Still, it was a chilling reminder of the reality in the world's two most populous nations, where, as an old Chinese lady who witnessed female infanticide was quoted by The Economistas saying, “It's not a child. It's a baby girl, and we can't keep it…Girl babies don't count.”

But someone is counting baby girls and boys, men and women. In fact, thousands of people are right now fanning out across India for the mammoth exercise, one of the largest in the world, of the 2011 Census.

The 2001 census brought home the point starkly that millions of girls in India never saw the light of day. Either they were never allowed to be born, due to sex-selective abortions, or were killed shortly after birth. As a result, in the 0-6 year age group of children, there was a marked increase in boys as compared to girls in some of the richest districts in the country. Clearly medical technology, that the better off could afford, had been perversely put to this kind of use — of ensuring that girls were eliminated before birth.

The 2011 census will be significant in more ways than one. In 2001, the problem that had been lurking for years was exposed through stark, irrefutable data. As a result, the government had to act. It tightened the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act 2003 (also known as the PCPNDT Act). Campaigns were run for the “girl child”, incentives given for her education, and threats held out of punishment and fines against those misusing technology for sex-selective abortions. How effective were all these efforts? Results from the 2011 census will tell us.

It is small comfort to know that this problem is not unique to India. The article in The Economist, for instance, gives startling data on the situation in China where decades of son preference and a one-child policy as well as sex selection have resulted in a marked difference between the number of young men and women. The article quotes research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that predicts that by 2020, China will have 30-40 million more men less than 19 years of age as compared to women. (The current sex ratio in China is 123 boys to 100 girls).

Serious consequences

Such a situation fraught with serious sociological consequences, not the least of which is the shortage of brides. In India, in states like Haryana this has already come about with brides from other states being bought by young men who just cannot find a woman from their own region. Every other day we read stories about women from as far away as Kerala or Assam who have made Haryana their home. Nothing wrong with such cross-fertilisation in a country that is so divided by caste, religious and regional identities as long as the women know their rights and have a way out if things don't work out. What is disturbing is the reason this is happening — not free choice but no choice.

Tragically, none of this kind of data seems to create any ripples amongst those in a position to make a difference. Take Maharashtra, for instance, one of the richest states in India. This year's Economic Survey revealed that by 2011, the state's sex ratio would be 915 women to 1000 men, down from 922 in 2001 when it was significantly lower than the national average of 933. Maharashtra also has the dubious distinction of ranking 15 out of 28 states in India in terms of its sex ratio.

Yet, what is preoccupying the men who govern the state? Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has been tying himself up in knots trying to explain how the actor Amitabh Bachchan, who has chosen to identify with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the state's brand ambassador, came to share a dais with him at an official function. How does any of this matter? States like Maharashtra need governance, not showbiz.

The Economist referred to India as “that super giant”. But such compliments count for nothing if our government does nothing about “femicide” and those “missing” women.

Ash in the belly

Ash in the belly

HARSH MANDER

The Hindu Hard lessons of survival... Photo: Sumit Dayal

Glimpses into lives of people condemned to hunger, who yet find a space for dignity and hope in their lives…

The evening light is fading over an indigent rural hamlet in eastern Uttar Pradesh. We take shelter from the rain in a small earth home. Sitting on the uneven mud floor under a dripping thatch roof, a clutch of Musahar women talk of many things: of the diverse ways they negotiate their difficult lives, without land, without work, often without food, and without hope. As the rain ebbs more women gather, and the talk turns eventually to the raising of their children amidst want. They speak then of the most terrible of lessons that each of them has to teach their children.

This is the lesson of how to sleep hungry.

‘Half the week we are able to eat roti or rice with either vegetable or dal. The other half, it is just roti, or rice boiled with salt and turmeric. But there are four or five days in a month when there is no food, and we have little option except to fast. If there is any food, we give it to our children, adding a lot of water to fill their stomachs. Any additional food goes to our men folk, because we women are used to staying hungry'.

Dark days

On these desolate days each month when there is absolutely no grain in the house and no work to be found, the entire family sets out literally in search of food. They look for undigested grain in the dung of cattle, and by burrowing in the stores of field rats. They glean grains of paddy or wheat that may have fallen on farmers' fields that have been harvested, or forage for stale vegetables which are discarded after the weekly village market. If the family is fortunate, a full day's quest yields just a fistful of grain. This is boiled in a large pot of water to create the illusion of plenty, with chilly powder and salt.

But the children's bellies are still empty, and they are restless and clamour for more food. ‘It is difficult for us to bear their weeping', the women continue. ‘When the wailing of infants gets too much, we lace our fingertips in tobacco or wild intoxicants and give the fingers to the babies to suck. It helps them sleep even with nothing in their stomachs. If they are small, we beat them until they sleep, but as they grow older, we try to teach them how to live with hunger. It is a lesson that will equip them for a lifetime. Because we know that hunger will be with us the rest of our lives.'

Other lives

Dialogues with people for whom hunger is a way of life has helped some of us who have never personally known involuntary hunger, to try to comprehend, even if just very little, the ways that people condemned to hunger cope, and still find ways to live and hope. It is these dialogues with people who live with hunger — to which I will return repeatedly in this column — that have constantly challenged my detachment. They will yours.

Arkhit, and elderly widower from Orissa, cooks rice once a day, and that too only if he is able to muster the energy and will necessary to cook for just himself. If not, he just brews black tea, drinks it and goes to sleep. For aged Somaiah in Andhra Pradesh, most days are preoccupied with finding some dalto eat with boiled rice. His neighbours on occasion share some dal from their kitchens after diluting the leftovers with water. Many aged people go to the village government school and beg for a little dalor sambhar (spiced lentil soup) from the mid day meal prepared for school students. Aged widow Malti Bariha craves for curry with her rice, but cannot afford the spices. She sometimes does not have the energy even to collect enough firewood; at such times the rice and potato that she customarily eats is half cooked.

Widowed early, Antamma was abandoned by her children when she grew in years. She confesses that most of each day, her thoughts centre on how she will procure her next meal. There are times she wants to beg, but worries that her neighbours will gossip when her back is turned. She once begged at the school for morsels from the State-funded school meal for children, but was torn by guilt afterwards that she had eaten the children's share of food. When Rajasthani widow Mani Yadav cannot get work even after begging for employment, and her government pension is depleted, she drinks tea and hot water and tries vainly to convince herself that her stomach is full.

Sankari, an Oriya widow, used to collect bamboos that were soft and small, and crushed these into a paste for her family. Another meal was of kaddi — a poisonous wild plant, which she cut into small pieces and pressed into a basket which she immersed in the river for a day. The river water drained away some of the poison and the family got its food. It tasted foul, so she mixed it with a little jaggery and salt. June and July were good months for Sankari, as shemanaged to collect wild fruits (tholand kusum) and exchange these for broken rice (usually fed to chicken) and salt. Only during the monsoons, her children were able to taste meat, as she collected snails and scooped these for their flesh. Her hours of toil were rewarded because the children relished this. When she was able to get work in the fields, she was paid one and half kilograms of mahua. Now that her children are grown and she is alone, she spends her entire State old age pension on buying rice. However, this rice is not enough to last the whole month.

Long struggle

Udiya Bariha, now frail and wasted at 75 years, lost both her eyes as a child to small pox. She became an orphan at the age of 15, and says, ‘from that day till now I am struggling, yet death has not come to my door'. Alone she has survived 60 long years of unmitigated want, after her father died. All these years later, she says it is still difficult for her to light a fire on her mud stove. Udiya trudges most days to the forest to collect dry wood for fuel and to sell; then she cooks rice and eats it with water and spinach. In the evening, she cleans cowsheds and in return gets cooked rice. On days when she was not able to go anywhere due to exhaustion or illness, she begs in the village for food.

When it was discovered 14 years ago that Dhonu Badiya suffered from leprosy, his brother turned him out of his home, and he was reduced to surviving by begging. He lived alone in a small hut at the edge of their fields in the village Burumal in the chronically drought-ravaged district of Bolangir in Orissa. Years later, the health worker insisted that he was cured, and his brother finally relented and gave him shelter in an open veranda of the cowshed of their home. His entire belongings are one frayed change of clothes strung on a rope, and a couple of dented aluminium vessels. The food his brother gives him in return for grazing his goats in the scrub hill near the village is small quantities of baasi or fermented rice water cooked one day earlier. It takes Dhonu more than an hour to painfully scoop up this liquid with his fingerless hands and bring it to his mouth. He longs for a pension from the government, so that he can buy enough food to fill his stomach, solid food that he can eat with greater dignity. He also wants soap to clean his body. These are his only dreams.

Are they slum children or ‘slum dogs'?

Are they slum children or ‘slum dogs'?

Chandigarh administration terms slum children as ‘slum dogs'

Slum children have better eyesight than urban students: survey

CHANDIGARH: While comparing the refractory errors of students in urban areas with slum dwellers, the Chandigarh administration has addressed the latter as ‘slum dogs' while concluding that they have better eyesight.

In a release issued on Sunday, the administration states: “The slum dogs of Chandigarh, wallowing in illiteracy, poverty and ignorance, have beaten their blessed brethren in the urban areas, to better eyesight honours. Sounds incredible, but it is true.”

The claim is based on a health survey of children, studying in Alternate Innovative Education Centres (AIE), conducted by the Health department of the Union Territory Administration. According to the survey, only 3.27 per cent of those living in slums against 8-10 per cent of those coming from the urban areas, were found to have refractory errors.

Paramjyoti, Programme Officer, School Health Programme, Chandigarh, said, “The survey was undertaken in the light of such common occurring ailments as malnutrition, anaemia and worm infestation.” As many as 6,852 students of 88 AIE centres were medically examined. The teams carried out complete eye check-up of children for refractory errors and other eye ailments. Only 224 children (3.24 per cent) were found to have refractory errors. Thirty of them had been given spectacles free of cost under the Blindness Control Programme. “Out of these, 134 [1.81 per cent] children were found to be suffering from Bitot's Spots, and they are being treated with Vitamin A supplements. Three children had cataract problem and two of them have been operated upon successfully, and the third one would be operated upon soon,” said Dr. Paramjyoti.

The official said the result was a matter of further study. “I think it may be because of less exposure of the slum dogs to new technology. They go to school late, view TV less, and eat whatever their mothers give them coated with mother's affection and love.”

The report says children of as many as 42 AIE centres did not have refractory errors. A higher number of children of GMHS Vikasnagar were suffering from refractory errors (16.90 per cent).

Menu, rich and precise, for rural job meet

Menu, rich and precise, for rural job meet

Thoughts with poor, thoughtful on food

Architects of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme will be gratified to know that the blockbuster programme is putting food o the table in Bengal.

Sample the menu: baby corn tossed salad, aloo pineapple salad, chicken butter masala, fish Irani kebab (dry), butter naan, aloo meth masala, yellow methi dal and chocolate mousse.

Sample the event: a twoday workshop of 130-plus officials and panchayat representatives on the job scheme. Officials taking part in such workshops are not expected to run on empty stomach, though the food bill (Rs 1.79 lakh) is certain to raise some eyebrows, especially since the purported beneficiaries at the end of the chain are paid only Rs 100 each a day for their labour.

But a note attributed to a rural developm ent czar offers a fascinating -and fastidious, if the eye for detail is given due credit -picture of how a bureaucracy that is often labelled insensitive functions when it comes to food.

The note -"copy forwarded for favour of information and necessary action to" as many as six officials in various state government departments -also tries to live up to the standards pursued by the followers of Sir Humphrey Appleby , the permanent secretary in Yes, Minister.

The "food arrangements" for the workshop held last week at Stadel, the hotel in Salt Lake stadium, literally take the cake for precision planning -something usually not in evidence when the Bengal government tackles graver affairs.

After the multiple-course meal (see chart), the note takes care to remind the recipient (a Stadel official) that "2 times tea and coffee with assorted biscuits to be served as complementary". The main meal cost Rs 517.50 a plate (Rs 460 plus 12.5 per cent tax per head). In keeping with the egalitarian spirit of the scheme and the government of the day, item number eight on the note adds: “100 food parcels for the drivers and securities on 23rd and 24th April 2010, the parcels should contain: Peas Pulao, Chicken Curry, Mix Veg, Yellow Dal, Hot Gulab Jamun”. The bill for this: Rs 225 a parcel (Rs 200 plus 12.5 per cent tax).

The note is attributed to R.K. Maiti, special secretary in the panchayat and rural development department in the Bengal government. He is also the additional chief executive officer of WBSRDA (the West Bengal State Rural Development Agency).

Alas! The special secretary’s culinary drafting skills do not appear to have won too many admirers in the dour corridors of power.

“When the order was issued, I was in Delhi and hence was not aware of it. It is indeed a childish order and dilutes the very importance of the two-day workshop that we had,” said M.N. Roy, principal secretary, panchayat and rural development.

“Participants in a workshop need to be served with lunch but there is no doubt that such a frivolous order on what is going to be served shouldn’t have happened,” Roy added.

Roy’s personal assistant was among the six who received a copy of the note with the diligent entry: “For favour of information with

reference to the telephonic discussion held on 15th and 16th April 2010.” Maiti could not be contacted.

The meeting and the expenses did not flout any rules. The note mentioned that the bill for the workshop would be paid out of the MGNREGS contingency fund, which the state government can use for meeting administrative expenses like purchasing furniture, conveyance of local office bearers and monthly meeting expenses.

Roy pointed out that the workshop did tuck into weighty matters. “We deliberated on our achievements over the past one year and the shortcomings that need to be taken care of to cover more people under the scheme,” the principal secretary said.

Not all will agree on the scale of the “achievements”.

Against the national average of 40 days of average employment in 2008-09, about 72 per cent of eligible households in Bengal did not get even 15 days of employment a year.

The scheme has provided employment to only around 34 lakh households in Bengal, which is way behind others like Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in terms of number of persondays, work completed and expenditure. But the Centre did acknowledge recently the turnaround in two districts — North 24-Parganas and Burdwan — in terms of implementation.

Lessons from BPL Censuses

Lessons from BPL Censuses

V. K. Ramachandran, Y. Usami and Biplab Sarkar

To perpetuate a system that assigns a household to a single BPL/APL category in circumstances in which poverty is multi-dimensional is not only bad economics, but unconscionable as well.

The pilot surveys for the next Census of BPL (below-poverty-line) households are due to begin. Discussions are now on to finalise the methodology for the survey, and as the BPL Census is a matter of the subsistence and survival of hundreds of millions of India's households, it is important that we draw lessons from the experience of past BPL Censuses.

Poverty alleviation programmes in India can be categorised into universal programmes (or programmes whose beneficiaries are self-selected), and targeted programmes (or programmes that are exclusively for predetermined target groups). An example of the former is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, for participation in which any “rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled marginal work” qualifies. Most anti-poverty programmes, however, are targeted programmes. The Public Distribution System (PDS) for the provision of fair-priced food, and the Indira Awas Yojana (IAY), India's major rural housing scheme, are examples of targeted programmes.

The criterion for targeting is, most often, whether or not a household is below the poverty line. Identifying BPL households as on the ground is thus crucial to the implementation of targeted anti-poverty schemes. Indeed, the XI Plan Working Group on Poverty Elimination Programmes has written that the “best course in future would be to rely increasingly on the aggregation of BPL Survey data for the policy decisions at the state and central level and for monitoring the progress of poverty elimination.”

Since 1992, the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) has conducted three BPL Censuses in rural areas.

The BPL Survey of 1992 used an income criterion to determine poverty, and the annual income cut-off was fixed at Rs. 11,000 per household. The BPL Census of 1997 was conducted in two stages. First, some families were excluded on the basis of certain criteria. In the second stage, each remaining household was interviewed to determine its total consumer expenditure, and was identified as a BPL household if its per capita consumer expenditure was below the poverty line set by the Planning Commission.

Unlike the previous BPL Censuses, the BPL Census 2002 used a “score-based ranking.” Each household questionnaire had two parts. Section A recorded some introductory characteristics of households. These were the “non-scoring parameters,” which did not figure in the final assessment of the household's poverty status. Section B, which recorded 13 “scoring parameters,” was intended to evaluate the quality of life of the households. A score (0, 1, 2, 3 or 4) was assigned for each parameter. The aggregate score of the thirteen parameters for each household was calculated and the absolute and relative position of each household in a village in respect of its poverty status was set.

The BPL Census 2002 has been widely criticised by the rural poor and their organisations, and by scholars. Even the expert group set up by the MoRD to advise it on the methodology for the next BPL Census said that, although the number of parameters needed to measure poverty had gone up from one in the 1992 survey to thirteen in 2002, the errors of exclusion and inclusion remained above acceptable limits. Targeting errors involved exclusion errors, which exclude poor households from the category of the poor, and inclusion errors, which include non-poor households in the category of the poor.

We recently conducted a study of the reliability of the BPL Census of 2002, comparing household-level data from the MoRD website for four villages (one each in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh) with village-level socio-economic data collected by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies in the same villages.

There were four types of causes for exclusion and inclusion errors in BPL household identification. First, there are errors involved in the survey, i.e., in the questionnaire and in the investigation process. The selection of indicators and the scoring scheme for each parameter have rightly been criticised for their inconsistency. There were two major types of problems with respect to the stipulation of scoring parameters. The first set of problems relates to specification. With regard to many variables there are problems of mis-specification, under-specification, or vagueness, allowing for no certainty in how a household is to be classified. The second set of problems relates to gradation. It is not always true that a higher score in the questionnaire represents lower poverty in practice. For instance, with respect to the indebtedness parameter. although a household that has a few paltry household assets and no debts could be one that is in fact too poor to be considered creditworthy by even an informal-sector lender, such a household receives a score of 4, which is higher than the score assigned to, say, a rich landlord who borrows only from commercial banks.

Secondly, there was data-cooking or manipulation after the survey. Even the expert group wrote that “in actual practice no detailed survey was done and survey sheets were filled up within the office itself.”

Thirdly, one of the most serious flaws in the methodology of BPL household identification was in the aggregation of scores of 13 parameters to establish the absolute and relative position of each household with respect to poverty status in a village.

Lastly, another serious cause for exclusion errors is the way cut-off scores were set for each State, district and village. According to the MoRD guidelines, the State-level cut-off was set at the level of the official Planning Commission poverty line plus 10 per cent as an allowance for including the “transient poor” in the BPL category. The determination of the cut-off for administrative divisions within the State (district, block, and village, for example) was left to State governments. As a consequence, the aggregate cut-off score for the determination of BPL households could vary across those administrative entities. In our study, in one State the cut-off varied even from village to village in the same block.

Two main methods of conducting the fourth BPL Census are now under discussion. The first, suggested by the Expert Committee chaired by N. C. Saxena, proposes a method that will identify those who will automatically be excluded, “ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable sections are automatically included,” and grade the rest to identify the poorest among them. The second proposes that identification be broadly on the basis of exclusion and inclusion.

Past experience teaches us important lessons. First, any system of score-based ranking to identify the rural poor is inevitably — in theory and practice — arbitrary, unfair, and inequitable. Secondly, poverty is multi-dimensional, that is, people can be poor with respect to some or all of a range of criteria — for instance, with respect to income, hunger, health, schooling and education, housing, access to the means of sanitary living, and so on. Why then should a single classification of poverty — whether based on criteria set by the MoRD or the Planning Commission or a combination of the two — be considered adequate to measure whether a person is income-poor, nutrition-poor, education-poor, housing-poor, and so on? The natural beneficiaries of a scheme that provides housing should be the population without adequate, safe and clean housing, just as the natural target group for a scheme to provide sanitary toilets is those who have no access to such facilities. Why should access to such schemes be determined by arbitrary reference to fictitious BPL categories? And why should State governments be forced to fit welfare policies to the Procrustean bed of the MoRD's current BPL measure?

In India today, BPL and APL (above poverty line) are not used merely as analytical categories, but as categories that determine inclusion in and — more important — exclusion from anti-poverty programmes. The basic welfare of households and their access to facilities that should be basic rights — food, education, health, and sanitation, for example — is made or broken by the system of BPL-APL segregation in our administrative system. To perpetuate a system that assigns a household to a single BPL/APL category in circumstances in which poverty is multi-dimensional is not only bad economics, but unconscionable as well.

( V. K. Ramachandran is a Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Yoshifumi Usami is a researcher at the University of Tokyo, and B. Sarkar is a Research Assistant at the Foundation for Agrarian Studies.)

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