Senate question hour: ‘BISP funds for PPP workers only’
Senators from the opposition and even the government’s coalition allies expressed outrage at allegations of the misuse of funds allocated to the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), with some going so far as to call it a “programme for the PPP workers only.”
At a senate question hour session on the matter, Zahid Khan, an Awami National Party (ANP) senator from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, alleged that billions of rupees have been disbursed under the BISP to people who submitted fake names, given out by parliamentarians to people they did not know. Meanwhile, the senator claimed that he was unable to get any funds for people in his constituency.
“I distributed 800 BISP forms among the people of my constituency but they have not received a single penny even after two years,” said Khan. “The BISP is for the PPP’s workers only,” he said.
Meanwhile, others alleged a geographic bias in the disbursement of BISP funds. Senator Humayun Khan Mandokhel from Balochistan pointed out that over 900,000 people were beneficiaries of the programme in Punjab but only 19,843 were able to receive any funds from the BISP in Balochistan.
Senator Abdul Rahim Khan Mandokhel of Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party concurred with that opinion. “There is a lot of discrimination against the people of Balochistan because only workers of the PPP are cash-grant beneficiaries.”
Senators from the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz and the Jamaat-e-Islami called the programme a vehicle for the ruling PPP’s political purposes and termed it a failure at poverty eradication.
Others suggested that the money could be better spent. Pakistan Muslim League Quaid Senator Naeem Hussain Chattha said “We can spend this amount on the energy programme to run our factories which are not working owing to power outages.”
The cabinet member charged with responding to these allegations rejected the notion of any bias or discrepancies, saying that the programme was being funded by international donors such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose aid is only conditional that it be used for an income support programme.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 6th, 2011.
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