Patna, July 1 (PTI): Extending support to the proposed central legislation in the form of a National Food Security Act (NFSA), Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar today suggested that the Union government cover all poor people in every state.

In his letter to Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar yesterday, Nitish had expressed his doubts regarding comprehensive coverage, saying that the contents of the concept papers and the haste shown by the Centre in this regard, indicated that some sections may remain uncovered.

Through the legislation, the Centre is proposing to provide food security to all citizens of the country, especially BPL households.

Nitish stated that his government had apprised the Centre of its concerns to the proposed legislation and added that any flaw in the proposed act, leading to unintended exclusion of the genuinely poor, will only result in unnecessary discord at ground level.

Raising his doubts, Nitish said any proposal to impose a ceiling on the number of BPL families would be fundamentally flawed since it is not prudent to assume that the numbers arrived at, through any survey irrespective of the methodology adopted, will necessarily approximate to the number fixed by the ceiling. He added that there was a gap between actual numbers found at the ground level in the survey and the ceiling fixed by the Centre.

Against a total number of 65.23 lakh BPL families fixed by the Centre for Bihar, the state government’s number was found to be 1.5 crore in a recently conducted survey.

The chief minister said the objectives of the proposed act can be met more effectively by adopting a system of direct cash transfers to beneficiaries, instead of resorting to a complex delivery mechanism, fraught with the possibilities of default and errors.

He pointed out his concerns over the manner of measurement of poverty, saying that the estimation of poverty in the country was far from being conclusive and that the Planning Commission was able to capture just a fraction of the actual ground reality.

He referred to the recent report compiled by the Arjun Sengupta Committee that had concluded that the extent of poverty in India may be exceeding 80 per cent of the total population — even under the most conservative yardsticks.

Nitish said some of the momentous issues in the proposed legislation should be addressed at the very initial stages.