A new framework by Govt to determine beneficiaries under Welfare Schemes

• After the poverty line, the Indian government is looking to move to a new framework to determine beneficiaries of welfare entitlements.
• This framework is grounded in the Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC), the numbers for which were released this July for rural India.
• SECC divides households into three brackets:

Automatic exclusion: SECC looks at 14 questions relating to attributes like income, asset ownership and living standards. Across India, around 40% of households fall in this bucket.

Automatic inclusion: It also looks at five questions related to social position and standard of living. Across India, less than 1% of households were placed in this category.

Conditional inclusion: That leaves about 59% of households. To place them, the SECC looks at seven questions on deprivation to assess a household’s social and economic vulnerability.

Source: LiveMint