Chapter: National Issues

Topic: Zero Score Household

Q. Write a short note on currently held on Socio-Economic & caste census & it’s Modus Operandi.

Ans. 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:

(1) Living in a single-room kaccha house;

(2) Having no adult member between the ages of 16 and 59;

(3) Being a female-headed household with no adult male member aged between 16 and 59;

(4) Having a disabled member and no able-bodied member;

(5) Being a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe; (6) having no literate adult above 25 years; and

(7) 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.

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