Three years to issue BPL cards : Vote bank politics ?
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: October 17 2011 -

File picture of a dharna underway at Langdum on September 9, 2009 to demand PDS items

If all the citizens were comfortably placed, earned more than the internationally accepted benchmark of the bare minimum, then there would be no need for the Government to lay down a dividing line to identify those who lead a hand to mouth existence and accordingly chalk out certain policies and programmes for their overall benefits and welfare.

The identification or clubbing of certain families in the Below Poverty Line scheme can be understood in the backdrop of this reality and in so far as the ultimate aims and objectives of this particular scheme is to help the most economically marginalised section of society it also stands true that it is in its implementation that the real worth of this scheme lies.

Different parameters have been laid down by the Centre since the policy of identifying families which can be clubbed in the BPL category took root and was implemented in 2002.

Here again, the BPL category was divided into rural and urban, each with their own parameters and the common factors running through the urban and rural categories include dwelling house, food security, sanitation, employment status, access to drinking water etc.

Each State of the Indian Union are free to work out their own parameters or adopt the ones laid down by the Centre and it is not very clear whether the Government of Manipur has worked out the parameters to identify the families which may come under the BPL criteria, much less work out the number of families covered or to be covered by this scheme.

Apart from extending a helping hand to the economically deprived section of society, the underlying point in the BPL scheme is to ensure that its citizens can at least exist with a minimal sense of dignity as human beings. A benevolent scheme, no doubt about it.

Any understanding of the BPL scheme cannot be complete without an understanding of the Public Distribution System, which is a mechanism to distribute the items that may be distributed to the families covered by this scheme.

In Manipur the Public Distribution System operates under the Consumers Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Department, hitherto known as the Food and Civil Supply Department. The question is how effectively the Government has been able to implement this scheme at the ground level.

With a Public Distribution System, which does everything except ensure that the items meant to be distributed to the public are distributed, the failure of the BPL scheme to take off effectively in Manipur should not come as a surprise.

The report carried in the October 15 issue of this paper which detailed how it takes as long as three years for BPL cards to be issued to the intended beneficiaries tells a story of red tapism, bureaucratic hurdles, inefficiency and plain indifference dealing the crippling blow on a scheme which was actually thought up to benefit the marginalised section of Manipur.

Nowhere is the callousness of the Government exposed so nonchalantly as the report that there have been times when the BPL card, the green signal for the impoverished family to get their due share of the goods from the Government, is released after the death of the person in whose name the card was issued !

Moreover in the span of three years, this may mean that a family which was eligible to be included in this category at one point of time may have broken through the ceiling imposed by the parameters and may not fit the criterion laid down for the BPL scheme.

In fact so pathetic is the state of affairs that laying one's hand on a BPL card now comes with the rider of one's connection in the right place. This in effect means that far from benefiting the marginalised people, this scheme may have mutated into some sort of a mechanism to flaunt one's connection with the powerful and influential.

The uncomfortable feeling of vote bank politics casting its long shadow over a scheme which in the first place is meant to benefit the economically marginalised section of society cannot be written off that easily.

Much like the reservation policy, the BPL scheme presents the picture of a policy gradually inching its way towards the electoral zone where its basic utility has come to mean building up a vote bank.

Other wise why should it take three years to issue BPL cards ? And why have there been no instances of the whip being cracked against this delay which is criminal negligence by any stretch of the imagination ?