ISLAMABAD: The Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation, Dr Sania Nishtar, on Saturday launched Ehsaas National Socio-Economic Registry survey in South Waziristan to help the area people. A statement issued here said that during her visit to Tank and South Waziristan, Nishtar met with four tribal jirgas and sensitized their elders and influential about the purpose of the ongoing survey.

She stressed the need to facilitate survey teams in door-to-door collection of household data, adding poverty profiling of the households was being done through a computer-aided digital system and would be completed in next few months.

She said that tribal people should participate in the survey to get benefits from a multitude of conditional and unconditional cash transfer under the Ehsaas programme. She said that the government had executed the new Ehsaas survey on apolitical basis, so that no deserving family remained unattended under the flagship social protection programme.

According to Ehsaas policy, she added, the survey would ensure the inclusion of poor families in several Ehsaas initiatives - Kafaalat, Waseela-eTaleem Digital, Undergraduate Scholarship, Amdan, Interest-Free Loan, and Nashonuma.

She thanked the local teachers for doing a commendable job in executing survey enumerations, adding with the support of local teachers under the technical handholding of Ehsaas, the survey would be completed in those areas at the earliest. She said that the survey approach was being accelerated across the southern tribal districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the main priority goals of Ehsaas were to help the vulnerable population and uplift the under-developed districts.

She informed that 65 per cent survey in Tank district had already been completed. Tank and South Waziristan were the most underprivileged districts of the KP with high rates of poverty, malnutrition, and infant mortality.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021