CB BureauThe Supreme Court has asked the government to come up with a ‘real number’ on people living below poverty line (BPL). The court said that the official data claiming that there were 5.9 crore BPL families in the country was not convincing.
An apex court bench of Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice Deepak Verma said that a reasonable number on BPL families would help in taking care of the major problems of providing foodgrains to the poor and storing of foodgrains in warehouses.
The court observed that the figures on BPL families placed before it by petitioner People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) were ‘startling’.
The court said that all calculations regarding BPL families were based on the 2001 Census, but in the last 10 years, they must have expanded and grown. The court asked additional solicitor general Mohan Parasaran to have foodgrains distributed to the poor, instead of letting these rot.
‘The government may consider (the option of revising the BPL families’ figures) on its own,’ Justice Bhandari told Parasaran.
Parasaran admitted that there were differences in the central government’s and states’ parameters for identifying the BPL families. He explained that it was because of the differences in criteria that the states were quoting a higher figure on BPL families as compared to the central government.
Arguing for PUCL, senior counsel Colin Gonsalves said that even Planning Commission member Arjun Sengupta did not agree with the parameters adopted by the commission in identifying the BPL families.
Sengupta had earlier said that the number of BPL families was much more than the figures given by the government. He said that it was nothing but fudging of figures.
The senior counsel told the court that the government was trying to reduce the number of families in the BPL category by lowering the per-capita income figure that determines whether a family is poor or not.