KARACHI:
Apropos the editorial ‘BISP Corruption’ published in these columns, here is what the Benazir Income Support Programme has to say. BISP uses Poverty Scorecard based targeting mechanism to identify the vulnerable segment of society for extending financial benefits. The mechanism based on proxy means testing (PMT) gives an equal opportunity to each and every household of the country to participate in the door-to-door survey exercise, and their socio-economic status is determined on the basis of assets information provided during the survey rather than their public or private job status.
BISP introduced an exclusion filter aimed at excluding government employees from its beneficiary list with the help of data received from government agencies. It then excluded 140,488 government employees — 60% of whom belong to Grade 1-5 with average salary of Rs13.500; 39% belong to grade 6-16 with average salary of Rs21,200; and 1% belong to grade 17 and above. It may be clarified that government employees were not included in the programme through any collusion or by committing any fraud. Since there was no bar on the government employees to receive BISP benefits, these employees were declared eligible on the basis of information they provided regarding their assets at the time of survey exercise, as the PMT-based approach assesses socio economic status through assets, using proxy rather than income.
BISP is now using an updated poverty scorecard database which has further improved the targeting system and is also linked with other databases to cross-verify the information provided by households at the time of survey. Since a bar on receiving BISP benefits has been imposed on government employees, no government employee can receive benefits from the programme in future, provided their information is available with BISP.
Zulfiqar Ali Shaikh
BISP
Published in The Express Tribune, January 18th, 2023.
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