Socio-economic census to go through regular updates

Data helped weed out unworthy in Housing for All scheme

There could be regular updates to India’s pioneering social dashboard, the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC).
 
A panel of secretaries, including those from the ministries of rural development, statistics and finance, along with officers from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), are expected to decide at what intervals the data should be updated as a “social registry”. But it will not link these to caste.
 
As a mark of its confidence in the results gleaned from the exercise, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has cleared the final bill of Rs 4,893.60 crore for the SECC, against the approved expenditure of Rs 3,543.3 crore.

 

Amarjeet Sinha, secretary in the rural development ministry, said with the higher expenditure, the government had cleared all pending bills for the exercise. “We are now examining how to use the data as a baseline and then do periodic revisions to keep this vital input up to date.”
 
The Cabinet note had recorded: “SECC-2011 project has been concluded on March 31, 2016. The cost has already been committed and the project has met all its milestones.”
 
One of the key achievements of the SECC exercise, Sinha said, was its link-up with the Housing for All scheme. “Every CAG (Comptroller and auditor general) report has loads and loads of observations about how ineligible beneficiaries get into these schemes. SECC’s three-layered check has been a great help for us to weed them out.”

 
He said the SECC data had several data but the challenge was to figure out how to use it. “We figured that one of the data points related to housing status and that was when we began to use it intensively.”
 
SECC was a first-of-a-kind enumeration of all households to rank them based on social and economic status. It was conducted independent of the decadal Census, which does not cover the extent of poverty. Based on the data, state governments were supposed to prepare a list of families living below the poverty line. It became controversial as it also mapped the population on the basis of caste and also linked it to their conditions.

 
While data on other aspects were released by the SECC, the caste enumeration was never “completed”. As the data was not available to enumerators, it will not be revalidated in subsequent iterations.
 
Speaking about the use of the data on housing deprivation, Sinha said it showed a list of households living without properly built houses. This was further validated by visits of gram panchayats to verify the data. “As a matter of caution, we created a third layer on our web site, where we geo-tagged each house before giving any funds. This has almost totally eliminated the wrong people from getting the houses we construct,” the secretary said. Geo-tagging and verification of bank accounts have been add-on security features to ensure the houses are constructed for the most poor, like Scheduled Castes, he claimed.

 
In March 2016, the government had proposed the implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Grameen, to be completed by March 2019. The scheme, to close before the next general election, aims to build 10 million houses in villages for Rs 81,975 crore. The ministry plans to build about 5.1 million of those houses by March 2018, Sinha said. 
 
In a written answer to Parliament, the minister of state for rural development, Ram Kripal Yadav, had noted about 40 million rural households faced “house deprivation”, according to the SECC data.