ISLAMABAD, June 7: The new government is planning to rename the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), restructure it and scale down its allocations.

A senior government official told Dawn that the PML-N government had decided in principle to restructure the flagship income support initiative and turn it into a leaner programme, with effective targeting of beneficiaries. Its beneficiaries would be encouraged to become self-sustaining and income-generating members of society instead of being dependent on monthly stipends.

He said the organisation would be renamed as the National Income Support Programme (NISP), to give it a national face. As part of the next federal budget, the annual allocation for the programme would be reduced to about Rs50 billion from Rs70 billion currently.

The focus of the programme would be health and education programmes. The new government was in contact with international lenders and insurance companies to introduce insurance schemes for health and education, he said.

The sources said the new government felt that the administrative costs and advertising expenses of the BISP were on the higher side and wanted to reduce them from 7 per cent of the total size of the programme to a maximum of 3 per cent.

“The expenditure on administrative and advertising expenses at about Rs5 billion a year is unrealistic and will be reduced to about Rs2 billion per annum,” said the official.

At the same time, the government would undertake a special audit of the BISP expenditures of the last three years to ascertain its effectiveness, genuineness and transparency because it had received reports of ghost beneficiaries in some parts of the country.

It believed that a large number of consultants, particularly those funded through foreign funds, should not be continued because they had been hired in the initial years for some start-up projects which had been completed and might not be required anymore.

When contacted, a spokesman for the BISP declined to comment on the planned restructuring of the programme. “The future shape and design of the Benazir Income Support Programme is the domain of the new government. Therefore, BISP is unable to comment on this issue,” said the spokesman.

Answering a question about consultants, the BISP spokesman said the job of all consultants was linked to their performance.

Regarding performance of the consultants funded by lenders, the BISP spokesman said they were hired through a tough competitive process and were performing well and to the b est of their potential. “The consultants are providing necessary technical assistance to BISP and their services have been hired only to the point where the technical assistance is required by the programme”.

Regarding allegations that BISP had not provided agreements it had signed with banks for disbursement of BISP funds, the spokesman said during the audit the agreements signed with all partnering banks and other agencies were provided to the audit teams and nothing was concealed.

He said at a departmental audit committee (DAC) meeting between secretary of BISP and director general of federal audit, the audit teams had with them photocopies of the agreements signed with partnering banks. A series of meetings were held at the State Bank of Pakistan and a meeting was held at the presidency that was presided over by the president.

An official of the auditor general of Pakistan, however, said the audit teams were never provided with original agreements between the BISP and partnering banks and hence audit objections were communicated to the BISP through minutes of the DAC meeting. Throughout the world, audits are conducted on original record and not based on photocopies, he said.

He said the minutes of the DAC meeting sent by director general federal audit were not signed by the BISP which took up audit objections with the presidency to persuade the AGP to withdraw its objections. As a result, the BISP prepared minutes of the DAC meeting in concocted manner which were not signed by the AGP and hence some of the audit objections had been made part of the annual report of the AGP.

When BISP spokesman was asked to share minutes of the DAC meeting prepared by the Auditor General office, he first agreed to share but then declined in writing. “BISP cannot share the minutes of the DAC meeting because of the fact the information is confidential which cannot be provided to the media before the finalisation of the audit procedure and submission of report in the Public Accounts Committee.”

He wrote that while all the objections raised by the audit teams have been duly clarified by the BISP management, “it was unethical on the part of the audit officers to leak half-cooked information to the media creating misconceptions about the transparency and objectivity of the programme”.