February 03, 2009	Tuesday	Safar 07, 1430

KHAR, Feb 2: Well-off people, including contractors, doctors and businessmen having markets, have declared their women family members as destitute so that they could apply for the Benazir Income Support Programme in the restive Bajaur Agency, it is learnt.

Sources said assistants of parliamentarians from Bajaur had distributed registration forms among people without looking into their financial background and resources.

They told Dawn in Khar that influential people of the area, including government officials, contractors, businessmen, doctors, engineers and even local journalists, had obtained income support forms for their wives and other female family members and submitted the same.

Under the programme, each legislator has been provided with 8,000 registration forms of the income support programme and 24,000 forms had been submitted in the region. The Bajaur tribal region has two MNAs and one senator.

Women whose husbands have Rs6,000 monthly income have been declared eligible for the programme.

The PPP-led coalition government had launched the programme across the country, including tribal areas, to provide monthly financial assistance to poor women.

The sources said that due to the negligence on the part of forms’ distributors, deserving people had been deprived of financial assistance in the violence-hit region.

Aslam Khan, a watchman, complained he could not get the registration form. Like him, he said, other deserving people had also failed to obtain the forms, adding well-off people had applied for the programme in the area.

He alleged that aides of parliamentarians had also soled the registration forms. When approached on the issue, personal assistant of an MNA from the tribal belt claimed that a majority of the deserving people had left the area due to the violence and he had to distribute forms among others ‘under compulsion’.

Another factor, he said, was that a majority of tribal women did not have Computerised National Identity Cards and, so, they could not avail the opportunity.

The office of the National Database Registration Authority in Khar is understaffed and lacks the capacity to provide cards to women on war footing.A social organiser hailing from Bajaur told Dawn in Peshawar that needy women had been bypassed and forms distributed among blue-eyed people and on political grounds. He said the government should hold an inquiry into the issue and review the programme.

Militants in the North Waziristan Agency had earlier restricted women from applying for Computerised

National Identity Cards and availing the income support programme.