On Identification of Households below Poverty Line in BPL Census 2002

States and Union Territories have been asked, in the context of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, to launch the BPL (Below Poverty Line) Census 2002 as per the recommendations of the Expert Group on Identification of Households Below Poverty Line. Besides being used for the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the poverty alleviation programmes of the ministry of rural development, the BPL-APL (Above Poverty Line) distinction is already being used for pricing grain under the public distribution system and is likely to be used by other ministries also for �better targeting' of their programmes. Since expenditure of vast sums of taxpayers' money annually will thus be riding on the APL-BPL categorisation of households, it is imperative that the methodology proposed by the Expert Group underpinning the 2002 BPL Census is widely discussed and debated.