Including the poorest and most vulnerable population of any country in the health insurance programme is often the most challenging because they cannot pay any premium and are the hardest to reach. Many times they are also not literate and, therefore, require a very different approach for awareness generation. This is true for most Lower and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC) and India is not an exception.

Thus, PM-JAY has been rolled out for the bottom 40 per cent of poor and vulnerable population. In absolute numbers, this is close to 12 crore households. The inclusion of households is based on the deprivation and occupational criteria of the Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011 (SECC 2011) for rural and urban areas, respectively. This number also includes families that were covered in the RSBY but were not present in the SECC 2011 database.

The SECC involves ranking of the households based on their socio-economic status. It uses exclusion and inclusion criteria and accordingly decides on the automatically included and automatically excluded households. Rural households which are included (not excluded) are then ranked based on their status of seven deprivation criteria (D1 to D7). Urban households are categorised based on occupation categories.

In line with the approach of the Government to use the SECC database for social welfare schemes, PM-JAY also identifies targeted beneficiary families through this data.