Fewer urban poor could get benefits

DEBROY PANEL Number of those eligible for ‘automatic inclusion’ may come down drastically if govt accepts report

NEW DELHI: Urban households eligible for“automatic inclusion” in government-funded welfare schemes will come down from 18.1 million to 7.2 million if the government accepts a refined methodology recommended by an expert panel.

In terms of percentage, the number could decrease from 27.8% to 11.1%. There are 65.1 million urban households in India.

The committee, headed by NITI Aayog member and economist Bibek Debroy, was set up in January by the Union housing and urban affairs ministry. The panel’s goal is to fine-tune the method recommended in 2011 by another panel, led by SR Has him, to identify poor families in towns and cities.

The panel pegged the overall number of urban households entitled to at least one government benefit, even if they don’t qualify under the “automatic inclusion” category, at 30.9%.

The previous figure calculated through the Has him committee’ s method was 35%. In rural areas, nearly half of the 180 million homes fall in this category. “We are going through the Debroy panel’s report. No decision has been taken as yet,” said a senior ministry official.

Debroy was recently appointed chairman of the economic advisory council of the Prime Minister.

The prime minister’ s office discussed the report in September and directed the housing and urban affairs ministry to make the findings public.The ministry hasn’t done it yet. The Hashim panel’ s methodology, which was used for conducting the socioeconomic caste census urban areas, found 18.1 million households to be eligible for“automatic inclusion ”. But in villages, which have three times the number of homes than urban areas, the figure stood at a negligible 0.89%.

“In rural areas, the number of automatically included is less than 1%, in urban areas it is 27%,” a government official said.