Post UP win, BJP to recast its image as a pro-poor party

These moves are aimed at maintaining pro-poor image till 2019 Lok Sabha elections

Fresh from its UP success, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) plans to go into the 2019 Lok Sabha polls with more pro-poor image and less as a pro-economic reform party. To maintain this, the Modi government plans to roll out two big measures in the coming months.

Firstly, a comprehensive revision of the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) database in on the Centre's agenda. The objective of the review will be to include all left out beneficiaries from the 2011 census and widen the coverage of the government's social welfare schemes. It could also help the party reach out to the poor across all castes, particularly its core supporters among upper castes.

Another measure is the passage of a Bill to give constitutional status to a National Commission for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes, which the Centre hopes to achieve in the ongoing Budget session of Parliament. With this, the Modi government hopes to consolidate the BJP's newfound support base amongst Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

The Centre has already been effectively using the SECC database to identify rural poor for Ujjwala Scheme, where it has distributed free gas connections to 50 million households across India, the Prime Minister housing scheme and Deendayal Upadhyaya rural electrification programme.

A PTI report also said that the Centre believes that instead of the Below Poverty Line (BPL) method, the SECC would be able to weed out undeserving beneficiaries.

Both the Prime Minister and BJP Chief Amit Shah had credited the party's emphatic victory in Uttar Pradesh assembly polls to these pro-poor schemes.

The BJP and the Modi government have always been alert at preventing a repeat of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's 'India Shining' misstep in 2004 and has been restrained in chest-thumping about its economic reforms lest it overshadowed its pro-poor measures.

Officials said the SECC database will remain the bedrock through which the Centre would directly identify the poor and needy and provide them support. The database has also been extensively used for the rural sanitation programme.

"SECC is caste neutral, gender neutral, class neutral, religion neutral database, which identifies the extremely poor and needy and classifies them according to immediate needs. Extensive use of the data has helped us in creating a constituency of the poor, which is outside any caste or religion barrier," a senior official explained.

The Ministry of Power has suggested a 'Ujjwala plus' scheme to cover all those households left out in the first and second phases of the scheme, including those not included in the 2011 SECC database.

A high-powered committee constituted by the ministry of rural development under the chairmanship of former finance secretary Sumit Bose had suggested that the SECC database should be regularly updated so that it eliminates the need for more such censuses.

The SECC rural survey was carried out in 640 districts across the country and is considered to be one of the most authentic and fair identification of rural poor. The data showed that of 18 crore rural households, around 15.95 lakhs were automatically included that comprised of households without shelters, destitute living on alms, manual scavengers etc.

The urban data, which hasn't yet been finalised because of discrepancy over the method of calculation, showed that of the 299.99 million urban poor almost 21 per cent lived in slums, while 58 per cent didn't have any fixed source of income.

Incidentally, both the SECC were commissioned by the previous UPA government.