The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is all set to launch a new scientific survey across the country next year to identify those eligible for cash grants. In a background briefing to Business Recorder Friday, Minister of State and chairperson BISP Marvi Memon said 16 pilot projects for the new survey are being initiated this year in different districts of the country.
"We will roll out the new survey based on scientific techniques in 2017 and complete it before 2018," she said, "this would be a dynamic database unlike the past where a beneficiary could either be included or excluded even after completion of the survey." She said technical committees have been formed to learn from past mistakes and to design a new survey technique while all the four provinces are also being consulted for the first time.
The BISP conducted a country-wide poverty census using Poverty Score Card in 2010 and identified 7.7 million households living below cut-off score of 16.17 out of 27 million households surveyed. The BISP management has reached 5.2 million beneficiaries across the country so far while it plans to reach the rest in the next two years. According to World Bank, the BISP is rated among top 5 social safety nets of the world while Marvi Memon aspires to make it the number one through hard work and transparency.
Memon, however, says that her top priority is not only to reach the maximum number of poor identified across the country which she defined as poverty management but also focus on poverty alleviation through different projects. "Around 25,000 beneficiaries of BISP got loans under the Prime Minister Youth Loan Scheme to run their own businesses and projects. It is a great pleasure to see all of them now graduating out of BISP," she said.
The BISP data is also being shared with other government departments, provinces and even corporate sector who are working on different projects to eliminate poverty, she said. Giving details about Waseela-e-Taleem, she said the BISP has helped the provinces to enrol one million children last year in schools as the organisation provides a monthly stipend of Rs 250 per child to its beneficiaries. Among the one million children enrolled under the BISP, 47 percent are girls and 53 percent are boys, she said.
Memon said her organisation has also been working to empower women and make the cash transfer to its beneficiaries more transparent and easy. "The new system of the cash withdrawal from banks would be rolled out this year and this would help cut the mafia who take cards from our beneficiaries to draw the money and charge them for it," she said. The BISP has also been discouraging its beneficiaries through different awareness campaigns to give their cards to agents for withdrawal of their money, she said, adding that all this is being done in the beneficiaries' local languages and through street theatres.
According to an impact evaluation report, she said around 64 percent of the BISP beneficiaries have a control over their resources and the cash grant being given to them under the programme. The beneficiaries get a monthly stipend of Rs 1,500 while total budget of the organisation for 2015-16 stands at Rs 102 billion. Out of the total budget, 90 percent is being given by the federal government while the remaining 10 percent comes from World Bank, DFID and Asian Development Bank.
Memon said the utilisation of the funds was 72 percent in 2013 and it jumped to 94 percent in 2014-15. "The utilization of our funds is the best as compared to other government departments and ministries," she said. About Waseela-e-Haq and Waseela-e-Rozgar schemes, she said the two were badly designed by the previous PPP-led coalition government and their files have been dispatched to the National Accountability Bureau for investigation, she said.
Comments
Comments are closed.