(Online Course) Contemporary Issues for IAS Mains 2012: The Hindu - Zero Score House Hold
The Hindu
Zero Score House Hold
Q. Write a short notes on currently held on Socio-Economic & caste census
The SECC is supposed to “rank” rural households on a scale of 0 to 7. A household’s score is simply the number of “deprivations” it has from the following list of seven:
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living in a single-room kaccha house;
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having no adult member between the ages of 16 and 59;
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being a female-headed household with no adult male member aged between 16 and 59;
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having a disabled member and no able-bodied member;
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being a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe;
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having no literate adult above 25 years; and
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being a landless household deriving a major part of its income from manual casual labour.
None of these criteria apply in the above examples.
After ranking households in this manner, a cut-off is
supposed to be applied to identify “Priority” households — the main
beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System (PDS) under the proposed
National Food Security Bill (NFSB). For instance, if the cut-off is two, then
Priority households will consist of all households with a score of two or more.
The cut-off is supposed to be specified so that the share of Priority households
in the population is around 46 per cent — the proportion of the rural population
below the “Tendulkar poverty line” (about Rs.25 per person per day in rural
areas), with a small margin for “targeting errors.” That, at any rate,
seems to be the game plan as of now.
