Identifying BPL households: A comparison of competing approaches

Two approaches are available for identifying households below the poverty line – the score-based ranking approach proposed by the N C Saxena Committee and an alternative proposed by Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera. Comparing these approaches for Udupi district in Karnataka shows that the former does a fair job of revealing how households are placed on the economic spectrum but excludes more deserving households than the latter. Also, when it comes to implementation, the latter is transparent and relatively much faster.