Punjab

BISP poverty survey to be launched in Lahore

Poverty survey to facilitate government provision of support to relief victims to be completed by June 2011.

Express October 22, 2010

LAHORE: 700,000 families, affected by the floods, are already on the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) list and Rs4.4 billion has been provided to flood victims through its emergency package.

This was stated by the BISP chairperson Farzana Raja, during a press conference held at the Governor’s House. The conference was held jointly with Governor SalmaanTaseer regarding the launch of the BISP Poverty Survey in Lahore.

The countrywide poverty survey would be completed by June 2011 and enable the government to provide support to nearly 2.2 million people, Raja said. Raja assured the press that the BISP budget would not be cut and foreign funds would continue to flow into the BISP program because of its noble aim: eradication of poverty. The current budget of the programme is set at around Rs90 billion. Raja explained that the recently launched survey aimed at ensuring “effective and transparent identification of poverty stricken families”. She said that the survey consists of around 40 questions, the answers to which would be fed into a computer system that would analyse the data. “The automated system also provides a foolproof mechanism for the assessment of poverty,” she said, adding, “The poverty survey is critical in ensuring that everybody is looked after.” The BISP chairperson said that the survey had been completed in Balochistan. She said within the next week eligible families there would be selected for the programme.

Raja estimated that the country needed five to10 years of sustained welfare efforts to bring people living in the extreme poverty bracket into the middle class economic bracket.

The BISP chairperson also said that the high rate of inflation was related to high incidence of terrorism. She said that the government was carrying out jihad on two fronts, poverty and terror. Governor SalmaanTaseer spoke to the press for a bit after Raja was done. “When I visited the areas with Farzana, I saw how poor these people were. I handed out Rs4,000 and Rs5,000. It was sad that they had never seen that much money in their lives.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 22^nd, 2010.