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The PML-N government has proposed replicating Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) with Income Support Programme (ISP), allocating it Rs 75 billion in the federal budget for 2013-14. The project was initiated by the previous PPP-led coalition government to support the poor families.
The PML-N government proposed to rename it and increase the amount disbursed to each deserving family, up from Rs 1,000 per deserving family to Rs 1,200 a month. Announcing the decision, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said that PML-N had outlined a detailed social protection strategy in its manifesto.
"Indeed, I am pleased that in 2008 when PML-N was part of the federal government for a brief period, as Finance Minister I had designed a project of income support fund...It was a programme for supplementing the income of poorest of families on totally apolitical basis with a clear methodology for identifying the target population," he explained. When PPP lawmakers protested over the renaming of the programme, Dar told them that the purity of the programme had been compromised and it was politicised.
"We owe to our poor families that such a program should continue with appropriate safeguards and should, in fact, be extended to a larger portion of the target population," he said. He also announced that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had decided to continue and expand the Income Support Programme. He said that the programme's size would be increased this year to Rs 75 billion, up from the previous year's Rs 40 billion. However, he said that the government would "build an explicit exit strategy for recipients to ensure that this support does not promote dependency".

Copyright Business Recorder, 2013

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