Board meeting: BISP approves Rs102b budget for 2015-16

Programme meets IMF goal of disbursing stipends to 5 million beneficiaries

ISLAMABAD: Board members of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) on Friday approved a Rs102 billion budget for the 2015-16 fiscal year.

In a briefing the board was informed that under the Waseela-e-Taleem project of the programme, BISP has successfully enrolled 700,000 children in schools, during the last fiscal year, against the target of 600,000.

Chairing the meeting, PML-N MNA Marvi Memon, who is spearheading the programme, briefed the participants of the political direction of future conditional cash transfer initiatives which will be closely coordinated with the provinces.

A number of agendas were discussed in the course of the meeting which included “BISP budget for FY 2015-16”, “Updation of National Socio Economic Registry (NSER)”, “De-crediting policy” and “Accounting treatment of de-credited amount”.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, in his budget speech, had announced an enhanced budget of Rs102 billion to be allocated for BISP for this year.

Furthermore, the board gave its approval in principle for updating the National Socio-economic Registry (NSER), as the current data is almost five years old.

‘Key highlights’

BISP met the IMF target of disbursing BISP stipend to 5 million beneficiaries. Secondly, more cards were issued during shorter period which reflects greater productivity. As many as 415,430 new Benazir Debit Cards (BDC) were issued during the past six months at 125 BDC centers in comparison of 597,758 BDCs issued in 11 month period during 2013-14 at 166 BDC centers.

The board was further told that 125,714 records of the entire database of 5 million beneficiaries were wrong updates made with the connivance of BISP officials countrywide. To penalize the corrupt practices unearthed, the BISP management had started official proceedings on fast track basis.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2015.