Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is hopeful to complete the pilot phase of re-survey of 16 different districts in the country by April with the objective of updating its National Socio Economic Registry at a cost of around Rs 1 billion. BISP is using two different approaches, desk and door to door, to gather reliable data of those eligible for a monthly cash grant and other benefits.
"The updated data would play a pivotal role in planning and designing development programmes on financial assistance, vocational trainings, microfinance, education and health," a senior official of the BISP told Business Recorder on Thursday. The pilot phase of new poverty survey using the desk approach began from Haripur in June 2016 followed by Bahawalpur, Sukkur and Naseerabad.
In Sukkur, 113 counters have been set up in 36 centres for expected case load of 174,851 households whereas in Naseerabad 18 counters have been installed in 10 centres for expected case load of 30,532 households. Till date, 4,683 households in Sukkur and 1,781 households in Naseerabad have been registered.
The BISP has hired SEBCON, a local firm with mainly multilateral and government clientele, to conduct door to door survey in the pilot districts that include Layyah, Chakwal, Faisalabad, Mirpur, Lakki Marwat, Charsadda, Gilgit and Mohmand Agency. The survey in these districts will begin in the first week of January and will be completed by April.
The official said the survey was based on moveable and immovable assets to ascertain eligibility of a person for BISP's monthly cash grant and other benefits. "In the desk approach, all those who consider themselves eligible for the BISP's social security programme take the initiative to register themselves while in the door to door approach, a third party is being hired through a competitive process to visit the people and register them for the programme," he said.
"We will analyze data of both the approaches with help of different experts and use only one of them for the countrywide resurvey," he said, adding the quality of data was important for BISP to register the poor for the social security programme. He said the desk approach would help the BISP to keep the data dynamic to make sure that an eligible person could register with the programme even after the process of resurvey ends.
Physical verification of some random people registered through the desk approach would also be carried out later to confirm validity of the data and effectiveness of the approach, he said. He said BISP was also in touch with the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and other relevant government departments to verify data about members of a family, their moveable and immovable assets, passports and foreign trips.
"In our application form, there are a number of filters to verify eligibility of a person for the BISP monthly cash grant and other benefits," he said. At present, 83.9 percent of the beneficiaries are drawing their stipends through debit cards, 0.001 percent through Mobile banking, 13 percent through biometric mechanism and three percent are receiving funds through Pakistan Post. The official said all the beneficiaries would be required to draw their stipends only through the biometric mechanism after completion of the countrywide re-survey. He, however, did not have the information as to when the national re-survey would be launched and completed.
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