The Local Self-Government Department (LSGD) has appointed a committee to prepare guidelines for a survey to identify five lakh of the poorest families in Kerala, as part of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government’s programme to alleviate acute poverty. The programme was one of the major announcements made by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan after taking charge in the LDF’s second term. He had announced that the government aimed at bringing all families above the poverty line within the next five years.
The main aim of the programme is to identify destitute families and bring them above the poverty line through various projects at the grassroots level. As part of the project, the LSG Department has now appointed a committee comprising the Additional Chief Secretary, LSGD, and the Principal Secretary (Urban) to prepare the guidelines for the ground-level survey of poor families.
The LIFE model
All the local bodies will conduct surveys to identify the beneficiary families from their areas, based on these guidelines. A survey of a similar scale was conducted soon after the LDF government took charge in the previous term, as part of the Livelihood Inclusion and Finance Empowerment (LIFE) housing project. Kudumbashree was then tasked with identifying the homeless families in the State.
The beneficiaries of that survey were then categorised based on risk factors including homelessness, landlessness, and destitution. Though an exact picture of the interventions that will be made at the local level as part of the poverty alleviation scheme is not clear yet, it could work as a complementary to the ongoing projects, including LIFE.
According to the NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) index 2020-21 released last week, Kerala, along with Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, are ahead of the other States in meeting various goals, including elimination of poverty.
