ISLAMABAD: The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is close to achieving another milestone, as it has geared up to update the ‘National Socio- Economic Registry’ (NSER) which will provide a more dynamic update of beneficiaries across the country.

The new NSER would maintain a relevant and credible registry, and enable BISP to improve the coverage of its core programme and reduce exclusion errors by allowing families who met eligibility criteria but do not currently benefit from income support to update their information and enrol in the programme.

BISP chairperson Marvi Memon while explaining the reasons that necessitated updating the NSER told newsmen on Tuesday that the recent changes in the country’s economic indicators of poverty and unemployment might have significantly altered the household composition and demographic information.

She said that the new NSER data would be a national asset covering the entire country. Ms Memon has planned a parallel operational review team which will travel during the door-to-door survey. “It will be my policing team which will check data of survey teams, and also use the local government offices and citizen forums,” she said.

Similarly, there was a possibility that a household having entered the BISP programme at a certain level of welfare might no longer need assistance following a significant positive change in its welfare condition, she said.

It was also an internationally-accepted phenomenon that household demographics changed to a considerable degree in five years of time. Any error at design, implementation level or due to time, might lead to inclusion or exclusion errors causing wastage of public resources, Ms Memon said.

The updating of NSER is in place through a pilot phase which includes door-to-door survey in 15 districts across the country and one agency in Fata. During the pilot phase, the BISP tested self-registration as a data collection methodology in four districts — Haripur, Bahawalpur, Sukkur and Nasirabad.

The World Bank has observed that the BISP is associated with poverty and it is painful for the people to publicly declare their poverty. Pakistan with its culture of ‘safaidposhi’ (garb of nobility) prevents deserving people from registering under the BISP through this survey method. The “BISP needs to carefully examine the success of this method before choosing which NSER survey method to adopt,” World Bank advises.

The International Development Association (IDA) is processing a $100 million credit for the BISP using a ‘Programme for Results’ (PforR) lending instrument, and would be implemented over a period of four years (2017-2021). The disbursement of funds under the PforR modality will be linked to disbursement linked indicators (DLIs) tied to two result areas: institutional and systems development and income support for human development and access to complementary services.

As part of the exercise to upgrade the national socio-economic registry, the BISP is holding an international conference on Wednesday.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2017