7/27/2019 Hasan committee
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been put in cold storage.One committee member,
wishing to remain anony-mous said, The committeebased its
identification crite-ria on the parameters thatwere mapped by the
Socio-Economic Caste Census
(SECC). We did not build thecriteria in order to fit the50% cap
that the governmentimposed in the NFSA. Ourreview suggested that
thenumber of urban poor thatdeserve food subsidy in citiesis
higher.
A senior official of the
Ministry of Housing and Ur-ban Poverty Alleviation(MHUPA)
acknowledgedthis. Wishing to also remainanonymous, he said,
Theidentification of the urbanpoor using the criteria sug-gested by
Hashim Commit-tee should ideally not be
done keeping the imposedcap in mind, but the govern-ment has now
imposed a capand already informed theStates that they can
identifythe poor as they desire.
Political patronage
The panel members point-ed to the problems this willbring in
implementation of
the Food Act. Unlike in therural areas, the identificationof
poor beneficiaries in theurban areas has traditionallybeen done on
the basis of po-litical patronage. At least the
BPL survey had some basis,even if there were someproblems to it.
For cities thiswas the first systematic ap-proach the government
hadtaken. But, the methodologyhas been shelved and theproblems and
corruption en-demic to existing targeted
public distribution system inurban areas will continue un-der
the new law, one panelmember said.
For the record, PlanningCommission which orderedthe report said
it has in-principle accepted the re-port and passed it on to
theMHUPA. But, on its part thePlanning Commission has
instead sent the State-specif-ic limits on beneficiaries toall
for the food law. Theseaggregate to the 50% cap inurban areas and
75% cap inrural India. The MHUPA of-ficial said as the SECC
itselfis long way from completion
and the NFSA is already un-der implementation withfreedom for
States to decidetheir own beneficiaries,there is no urgency in
follow-ing up on the Hashim Com-mittee report. Practically, ithas
left the Hashim panel asredundant for the Food Act
as the Abhijit Sen Committeewhich had been formed todevelop
similar criteria foridentifying rural poor usingthe SECC.
The States gearing up forAssembly elections, such asDelhi and
Rajasthan havegone ahead with their own
methods of building on theold beneficiary lists datingback to
2002. This is for en-suring that none of the Statesgoing ahead with
the identifi-cation of beneficiaries for theact want to weed out
existingfraudulent BPL cards but on-ly add new beneficiaries
apolitically savvy thing to doin an election year.
Hashim Committee report onurban poor put in cold storageNitin
Sethi
NEW DELHI: The S.R. HashimCommittee report on urbanpoor has been
put in the coldstorage by the UPA govern-ment. The report,
submittedin December 2012 set out the
criteria by which the poorliving in urban areas were tobe
identified for various gov-ernment schemes, especiallythe National
Food SecurityAct (NFSA), 2013.
While the government hasfailed to formally adopt thereport, it
has let the States to
decide their own criteria foridentifying beneficiaries forthe
NFSA and put an artifi-cial cap on the numbers theCentre would
provide subsi-dy for.
The nation-wide cap onurban poor under the NFSAhas been put at
50%. Two
Hashim Committee mem-bers that The Hindu spoke toseparately said
if the govern-ment followed the commit-tee recommendations,
thenumber of poor in urban ar-eas would rise substantiallyand hover
closer to the 70%mark. Both expressed reser-vations that this is
part of thereason that the report has
Report put thenumber of poor inurban areas closerto 70%
............................................................................
Nation-wide cap onurban poor underFood Security Act is
50%............................................................................
