While the estimation of poverty at the national and state levels was done from time to time by the Planning Commission, periodic Censuses to identify those households that subsist below the deemed poverty line (BPL) have been conducted by the Ministry of Rural Development of the central government. The purpose of these censuses has been to identify the BPL households living in the rural areas who could be targeted for various transfers. This Census was carried out in each of the states of India three times (1992, 1997 and 2002) and each time the methodology used was different, because each time it was recognised that the methodology used earlier was seriously flawed. A new Census to identify the poor was already overdue in 2009, started in 2011 and was completed in 2013 (but its results were still being released slowly on the government's website at the time of writing in early 2015). This chapter spells out a methodology that was eventually used in the latest survey. This new method addressed the many large-scale exclusion and inclusion errors in identifying the poor that had resulted from the previous three Censuses, causing widespread discontent, injustice and fiscal loss to the exchequer due to trageting errors.

The BPL list is of enormous practical importance to both central and state government officials, as well as the rural population at large. This is because the central government uses it to identify the recipients of a series of Ministry of Rural Development and other ministry programmes. The Department of Rural Development was implementing a self employment programme (i.e., Swaranjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana or SGSY), under which the rural poor are organised into SHGs, and provided financial assistance and capacity building to set up economic activity through a mix of credit and subsidy (see chapter 3). The objective is to provide economic assets to BPL families so that they get incremental income on a sustainable basis. Similarly, the Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY) is a rural housing programme under which financial assistance is provided to BPL families for construction of a house. Indira Gandhi Old Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAPS) was extended to all BPL households in 2008 having elderly members of 65 years and above (see chapter 13).