BISP clarification

The news item "Charges of political affiliation: BISP faces prospects of closure after installation of interim set-up: Dlishad" published in Daily Business Recorder on September 18, is imaginary, speculative and based on a few baseless news items which have already been responded and rebuffed strongly by BISP. With the general elections looming near, such unfounded allegations for politicising the programme have started emerging without any solid basis.
Such assumptions and disinformation campaign will cause harm to a programme which is helping the socio-economic uplift of millions of our fellow disadvantaged Pakistanis and has earned a good name for the country amongst comity of nations. Strangely, the reporters have reached out to political parties and a retired government official for the sake of confirming or rather supplementing these allegations where the answer could have been made easily available to them from BISP but this office was never contacted in this regard.
It is also lamentable to misuse the name of the institution of Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for the sake of personal wishful thinking to defame this programme. BISP is a programme established through collective wisdom of the Parliament of Pakistan where members from all parties voted unanimously to approve its Act. It is working as per its role defined in the Constitution and strongly adheres to the Authority of all the State institutions including ECP. Hence, BISP will be the first organisation to abide by the rules that would be laid down by ECP in the Code of Conduct for general elections.
It is categorically underscored hereby that BISP is an apolitical programme with the sole objectives of poverty alleviation and women empowerment and its data has not been shared with anyone including any politician. This huge data base is maintained by Nadra and there are state-of-the-art protocols and procedures through which data is shared with BISP for payments to be made to beneficiaries. Personal and private information of the households cannot be shared according to the approved data sharing protocols between BISP and Nadra but only to Federal Government Departments, provincial governments and their departments and international organisations for specific projects (Details are provided on BISP website).
As far as the beneficiary identification mechanism is concerned, we all are well aware that when BISP was launched, there was no credible data of the deserving families present. Thus a procedure was devised to reach out to beneficiaries through parliamentarians. Equal numbers of forms were distributed amongst all parliamentarians irrespective of their political affiliations. Every single form was of a validly approved format with proper inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the recommendations so made by the latter were directly received by Nadra. Thereafter, Nadra not only made the data entries but also verified/analysed them to determine the eligibility of the deserving families.
For the identification of deserving poor families in a transparent manner, it was decided to reform the targeting process to minimise the inclusion and exclusion errors and to identify the underprivileged through a transparent, impartial and objective mechanism. Hence, BISP has replaced the identification of beneficiaries through parliamentarians by adopting the "poverty scorecard/ poverty census" which is a globally acclaimed instrument based on its objectivity and reduction of human bias in beneficiary identification. It has 43 questions and seeks information about 23 key indicators of a household's welfare status. There is not a single field that asks about the political affiliation of any beneficiary or her family. In order to ensure total transparency, a survey was carried out by organisations selected through stringent process based on World Bank Procurement Guidelines and selection approach while data entry, processing and verification is done by Nadra which receives the survey forms directly from the survey organisations.
Nobody can deny the fact that the Poverty Survey/Census, being conducted in Pakistan under Benazir Income Support Programme, is not only the first ever such initiative in the social sector of Pakistan but in the South Asian region as well. By virtue of the survey, BISP has identified 7.1 million most deserving families throughout Pakistan including Gilgit Baltistan, Fata and Balochistan. Through independent and third part evaluations and assessments by international organisations, the survey has been declared as most reliable, objective, apolitical and efficient practice for beneficiaries' identification.
We should bear in mind that in such a case of negatively criticising and wrongly politicising a welfare project, no political government will come forward to execute its party manifesto which is to work for the well being of the people. All the welfare and development projects at national and local level cannot be stopped thinking that they will benefit the government in coming elections as it will lead to utter disaster. The thing that should be scrutinised is how the programme is being executed and run; and it can be said for sure that the efficient technology based systems term BISP as the most transparent apolitical programme. The continuous support and confidence of international community depicts this reality.