ISLAMABAD: The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is presently in a fix whether to continue or not its two important projects aimed at skill development of unschooled manpower of the country.

According to documentary evidence available with Dawn, the Waseela-i-Rozgar and Waseela-i-Haq projects, launched under the BISP by the PPP government with fanfare, “have been put on hold due to operational and management issues”. “If agreed and approved by the BISP’s board of directors, the two programmes will be re-launched in 2016,” according to the documents.

Sources in the BISP told Dawn that the board had already taken up the matter and would give its final decision on the fate of the two schemes in coming days.

Also read: BISP denying payments to training organisations

Despite repeated attempts, newly appointed BISP Chairperson Marvi Memon, a PML-N member of the National Assembly, wasn’t available for comment.

However, an official privy to the development told Dawn that multiple factors had come into play which led to the suspension of the two most important schemes. But primarily, he said, the ever-shrinking fiscal space for the government was the main reason for winding up the projects meant to empower people to come out of the vicious circle of poverty.

The second reason, according to the official, was several ‘ghost beneficiaries’ spotted by the BISP under the PML-N government. He said that a separate inquiry was under way to determine whether the beneficiaries of the two programmes had actually got the money or other ‘players’ pocketed their money.

The two programmes, some in the BISP say, have been suspended in the name of re-redesigning and re-launching.

But the fact of the matter is that the BISP has stopped offering new opportunities to people who want to learn new skills and start their own businesses.

Under the Waseela-i-Rozgar scheme, the BISP provided technical and vocational training “enabling the underprivileged potential workers to work in formal and informal sectors and earn a livelihood and to alleviate their socio-economic status and help them get out of the vicious cycle of poverty”.

The programme offered a training course of four to six months to the selected people with a monthly stipend of Rs6,000. So far about 57,000 people have been trained under the programme at a cost of about Rs2 billion.

The Waseela-i-Haq scheme was meant to provide small loans of up to Rs300,000 to “the randomly selected beneficiary families currently receiving the cash transfers under the BISP to be validated through the programme eligibility criteria”. So far about 6,000 families have benefited from the programme.

The inquiry, the official said, would help determine how many of these families had actually graduated to self-sustainable status.

The scheme was launched with the concept that “it is generally believed that only unconditional cash benefits can potentially create dependency on the programme, and are not sustainable for a long time; hence, it was necessary to start a programme through which opportunities can be created for these families to enable them to earn their livelihood effectively and come out of poverty cycle. Therefore, beneficiary families needed to be provided with some exit strategy”.

Talking to Dawn, BISP’s former chairman Enver Baig expressed his surprise over the closure of the two schemes and said: “I was especially asked by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to focus on the two schemes because in the long-term they would allow the government to sign off beneficiary families by equipping them with necessary skill development.”

He said that during his one year in office, he had signed memorandums of understanding with a number of chambers of commerce and private businesses which were willing to provide training as well as job opportunities.

Published in Dawn March 24th , 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play