Socio-Economic Census to be recast
Fresh from its Uttar Pradesh (UP) success, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) plans to go into the 2019 Lok Sabha poll with its image burnished more as a pro-poor and less of a pro-economic reform party.
To this end, the government plans two big measures in the coming months. The first is a comprehensive revision of the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) database. The objective will be to include all those left out of the 2011 census and widen the coverage of social welfare schemes.
The second, which the Centre hopes to achieve in the ongoing Budget session of Parliament, is passage of a Bill to give constitutional status to a National Commission for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes. With this, the government hopes to consolidate the BJP’s support base among Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
The Centre has already used the SECC database to identify rural poor for its Ujjwala scheme, where it has distributed free gas connections to 50 million households, for the Prime Minister’s housing scheme and the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya rural electrification programme (Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana). Both the Prime Minister and BJP chief Amit Shah had credited the party’s emphatic victory in UP to these propoor schemes. A report from news agency PTI said the Centre believes the SECC would be better able to weed undeserving beneficiaries, instead of the Below Poverty Line method. The BJP and the Narendra Modi government have been aiming at preventing a repeat of the party’s India Shining misstep before the 2004 Lok Sabha poll. It has been restrained in taking of economic reforms, lest this overshadow its pro-poor measures.
Officials said the SECC database would remain the bedrock through which the Centre would directly identify the poor and needy, and provide them support. The database has also been extensively used for the rural sanitation programme. “The SECC is a caste neutral, gender neutral, class neutral, religion neutral database, which identifies the extremely poor and needy, and classifies them according to immediate needs. Extensive use of the data has helped us in creating a constituency of the poor, which is outside any caste or religion barrier,” says a senior official.
The Ministry of Power has suggested an ‘Ujjwala Plus’ scheme to cover all households left out in the first and second phases of the scheme, including those not included in the SECC database of 2011.
A committee constituted by the Ministry of Rural Development under the chairmanship of former finance secretary Sumit Bose had suggested that the SECC database be regularly updated, to end the need for more such censuses.
The SECC rural survey was carried out in 640 districts and is considered an authentic and fair identification of the rural poor. The data showed of 180 million rural households, close to 1.6 million were automatically included — without shelter, destitutes living on alms, manual scavengers and so on.
The urban data, which hasn’t been finalised because of discrepancy over the method of calculation, showed of the nearly 300 million urban poor, almost 21 per cent lived in slums; 58 per cent had no fixed source of income.
Incidentally, both the SECC rural and urban censuses were commissioned by the previous government.