The Orissa government has directed district collectors to ensure that HIV-positive people, tribals, daily labourers, differently abled persons and beggars are not omitted from the new Below Poverty Line (BPL) list.

The directive was issued by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik at the collectors’ conference here, attended by collectors of all the 30 districts and secretaries of different departments. The last BPL census in Orissa was done in 2002 which showed more than 75 lakh families, or 47 per cent of the total population of the state, below the poverty line. The new list has to be prepared in three months.

Naveen asked the collectors to ensure that “undeserving” families were excluded from the new list, processing for which is scheduled to begin from November 1. The state government had received a large number of complaints about well-to-do families featuring in the BPL list.

Recently, an expert group of the Rural Development Ministry on the methodology for conducting the BPL census for the 11th Five Year Plan has suggested to the Orissa government  that the actual level of BPL population in the state should be revised to 84.47 per cent from the present 47 per cent.

In its report the expert group headed by former bureaucrat N C Saxena said that the percentage of rural population that was poor and was not able to satisfy the minimum required calorie needs was far greater than the present cut-off line of 28.3 per cent for the country and 47 per cent for Orissa. The committee strongly recommended that the percentage of people entitled to BPL status be drastically revised to at least 50 per cent in the country, which corresponds to an intake of 2,100 kilo calories a day, or a minimum cereal consumption of 12.25 kg per month.

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