An NGO has filed a petition against the Benazir Income Support Programme’s chairperson, alleging corruption worth billions of rupees.
Abid Hussain advocate, the honorary secretary of an NGO, Human Voice Welfare Association, alleged corruption by BISP managers in his constitutional petition. The BISP was supposed to work as a social safety net mechanism to alleviate poverty. The plan was to pay an unconditional cash benefit of Rs1,000 to underprivileged families who are financially hard pressed due to spiralling food prices and the cost of living. The BISP was designed with three main projects. In Waseela-e-Haq, a randomly selected family was to get financial assistance worth Rs300,000 to set up a mutually agreed upon project that would make the family financially self-reliant. The two other programmes were Waseela-e-Haq Health and Waseela-e-Rozgar in which a woman or anyone she nominated would receive vocational and technical training to help them support the family.
However, argued the petitioner, instead of benefiting the needy, the huge amounts of money allocated for these ambitious projects were swindled, shaking the already fragile faith and trust in government institutions and organisations, programmes etc. The petitioner argues that poor people, men and women are seen running from one post office to another to get the money but return without a satisfactory answer.
The petitioner asked the court to direct the people named in the petition to submit the entire records of the BISP and if any illegality is found to take judicial notice of it.
On Thursday, the Sindh High Court ordered for notices to be issued to the chairperson of the programme, advocate general of Sindh, the federal finance secretary, the director-general of the Pakistan Post and others, for a date to be fixed by the office of the court.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 22nd, 2011.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ