This article examines the government of India's 1997 criteria for selection of households for below poverty line ration cards. The main conceptual problems are that the criteria are static and uniform across the entire country. Using primary data (collected in 2002) from 400 randomly selected households from eight villages of Rajasthan, the exercise here calculates the proportion of "wrongly excluded" (i e, who qualify according to government criteria but did not get a BPL card) and "wrongly included" households. Of the one-third of sample households that were classified as BPL, nearly a quarter have been wrongly included. Besides, 44 per cent of the households which should have been counted as BPL were wrongly excluded. However, one must consider the appropriateness of the selection criteria along with these large selection errors.
