Daily Times

Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation Dr Sania Nishtar on Thursday announced that names of 820,165 undeserving beneficiaries were struck off from the list of Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) as their standard of living was above the criteria set for the poor people. Addressing a press conference, she said that the decision to remove the names from the BISP list had been taken after the approval of the federal cabinet. During the criteria review, she said, some aspects were looked into, for example, it was ascertained whether the family of a beneficiary had any motorcycle or car or whether a spouse was a government employee. Out of the total 820,165 beneficiaries removed from the BISP database, 14,730 were government employees, including employees of railways, post office and BISP despite the fact that the facility was not meant for the people working in government departments. According to the data, she said, 127,826 were those whose spouses were government employees or employees of the above mentioned departments. She said 153,302 were those who travelled abroad once and 195,364 were those whose spouses travelled abroad once. The number of beneficiaries who travelled abroad more than once stood at 10,476. Similarly, 166,319 spouses travelled abroad more than once. The BISP removed 692 people from its database because they owned one or more than one vehicle, while 43,746 were removed from the list because their spouses have one or more than one car. A person who can pay monthly telephone bill of Rs 1,000 is not eligible to get monthly stipend from the programme and, therefore, 24,546 people were removed for falling into this category. Similarly, 155,767 persons were excluded from the database as their spouses paid Rs 1,000 or more mobile phone bill. For applying for passports via executive centres, 666 beneficiaries were excluded and 580 were removed as their spouses did the same. A total of 36,970 people were expelled from the list of BISP beneficiaries because three or more than three members of their family paid executive fees for obtaining computerized national identity cards. To a question she said that BISP would save about Rs 60 billion annually due to exclusion of undeserving beneficiaries from the list. She said that more deserving people will be included in the list throughout the country after fulfilling the criteria laid down by the BISP. She said that her department had initiated the action as per the rules and laws against the BISP employees who enlisted themselves in the beneficiaries list. She said that as per the approval of the cabinet, women living on the Line of Control and having CNIC would be provided financial assistance under Kafalat programme. She said that the financial assistance under BISP had been linked with the rate of inflation. The Special Assistant said that in future, the registration of the deserving people in the beneficiaries list of BISP would continue. Registration centres would also be established in every district of the country to facilitate the deserving people for enlisting them in the BISP list, she added.