Rural development ministry to generate rank ordering rural households

New Delhi, Aug 9 (ANI): Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said his ministry will be generating a rank of rural households and not conduct a Below Poverty Line (BPL) survey.

Speaking to mediapersons here on Monday, Ramesh said his ministry is only responsible for the rank ordering.

"We will generate a rank ordering of rural households, which will be given to the state governments. Our responsibility stops there. It is the state government that is then going to use the Planning Commission estimates of poverty, the macro estimate of rural poverty to determine which of the households is going to be classified as BPL or not. We are just gathering data through six lakhs enumerators and six lakhs hand held operators," he said.

Further clearing the confusion between the role of Planning Commission and Rural Development Ministry, Ramesh said the former gives the percentage falling under and poverty while the later gives the rank on which they will be classified further.

"There is still lot of confusion I find between what the Planning Commission is doing and what we are doing. What planning commission is doing, just determining what the overall percentage of people living below the poverty line based on the head count ratio," he said.

"So how much poverty is being done by the Planning Commission and who in the poverty is going to be done by the state government based on the rank ordering of the households by the Ministry of Rural Development is going to generate from survey," he added.

Ramesh also said their prime motive is to see to it that people who deserve to be in this list are not ousted from it. (ANI)