What was just a murmur has turned into a shout, with the chief ministers of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh writing to the Union agriculture and food ministry disputing central government figures on below poverty line (BPL) population in the two states.
This is a significant development because it is directly related to the number of people who can benefit from the proposed food security bill.
Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar, said in his letter that social unrest cannot be ruled out if the state government’s much larger estimation of BPL figures is not taken into account. “Against a total number of 65.23 lakh BPL families fixed by the Centre for Bihar, our recent survey has thrown up nearly 1.5 crore families,” the letter read.
Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, however, said the Centre will stick to the Planning Commission-validated figures which the two states had earlier agreed to. “If we go by the state government figures, we will find that the number of poor in the country is marginally higher than the population of India,” he said.
