See through our eyes, not your ears.

Bihar CM warns centre for flawed BPL list

PATNA — With Centre planning a legislation to guarantee food security to the poor, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday sounded a word of caution against imposing a “ceiling on the number of BPL families”.

“Any flaw in the proposed Act, leading to unintended exclusions of genuinely poor people will only result in unnecessary discord and discontent at the ground level,” he said in a letter to Union Food Minister Sharad Pawar.

Kumar suggested that a system of direct cash transfer to beneficiaries should be adopted instead of resorting to the “complex delivery mechanism” which, he said, was fraught with possibilities of default and errors of inclusion and exclusion.

Making a strong pitch for the proposed National Food Security Act to “comprehensively cover all the poor in any state,” he said contents of the concept paper and the “haste” with which the Centre has moved, indicate the contrary.

Kumar also felt that any proposal to impose a ceiling on the number of BPL families would be fundamentally flawed and cited his own experience in Bihar in this regard.

“It is not prudent to assume that the numbers arrived at through any survey, irrespective of the methodology adopted, will necessarily approximate to the number fixed by the ceiling,” he said.

The Chief Minister earlier said the Centre’s survey left out several hundred eligible families. Last year, an all-party delegation demanded the Central government for increasing the number of BPL (Below Poverty Line) beneficiaries.

Earlier, he had also favoured a uniform national standard for preparing list of the people of Below Poverty Line (BPL) across the country. Nitish had proposed 16 ‘’standard points instead of existing 13 points” to prepare the list.

If the Centre approved new suggestions then at least more 35 lakh people in Bihar would be benefitted.