A poor BPL criterion

The way we look at poverty in our nation is interesting. We keep looking at the figures of the below poverty line population without perhaps realising the factors that get incorporated into these figures at the ground level. To suggest an example, the most recent way of finding out if a family in rural india is poor or not (BPL or not) is based on an asset based survey. So what are the questions like? Do you have a private toilet? If yes it gives your family four marks. But then, you forced me to have a toilet in the Samagra swachta abhiyan with all that talk about nirmal gaon. That is besides the point. Do your kids go to school? Yes. And that too without going for child labour. Yes. Good, four more marks. But then it was the Sarv shiksha abhiyan and all that talk of "school chale hum". That is besides the point. Such 13 questions ( the others arguably more sensible) and you have to be less than 14 marks to be a BPL family in rural India. So how come we have all those kids in the school and all those nirmal gaons and still so many BPL. It is the surveyor's ability to fudge that keeps these families from stopping their children going to school and razing down their toilets. The "assets" include such basic assets that it is downright unkind to link food security to the kid going to school, not going to school that is.
Well, with the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme there is an opportunity. In Madhya Pradesh at least, the cards have been made for all families and the attendance on these cards is a good indicator of how much value the family has for Rs 67/- per day against manual labour for an adult member. There are families where there is not even a single day's labour entry, as Rs 67/- per day is not of enough value to force an adult member to work for a whole day. Or else it might be due to his or her being engaged in something more remunerative that the opportunity cost of working in NREG renders it unattractive. A suggestion is to base the BPL line on the number of mandays rendered in the NREG scheme. Now that the scheme is to be extended to all the districts in the country, it can offer uniformity as well. Not that the muster roll entries cannot be fudged to show working against a particular family's card when the work is actually being performed by a JCB machine. But then fudging is being done in the present BPL survey too in a big scale. It might be possible that some families are fully comprised of infirm people who just cant work under NREG. They could be taken up as a special case with proper medical certification. These families would any way be forgoing around 6700 rupees ( more or less in other states) per year because of their non participation in NREG and it is all the more reason why their medical problem has to be taken care of in a more focussed manner. The verification of this exception would be much easier.