ISLAMABAD The government has removed some conditions of the Benazir Income Support Programme in order to reconsider cases of about 400,000 people whose applications for assistance were rejected during scrutiny.
'There was immense pressure and growing public complaints to waive three conditions in order to simplify the process and enable the deserving people to benefit from the programme,' BISP chairperson Farzana Raja told Dawn on Sunday.
The conditions waived, she said, pertained to bank accounts of applicants, mismatch addresses and the applicant and receiver being the same person.
Previously, bank accounts-holders were not eligible to benefit from the programme and such applicants were automatically rejected through a computerised processing system. Now this condition has been waived.
However, Ms Raja said, women maintaining accounts in big international banks such as Citi Bank would not be eligible for the BISP aid.
Similarly, she said, many applications had been rejected because addresses given in identity cards and in the BISP application forms did not match.
She said this condition had also been removed because many poor people did not own a house and they lived a nomadic life. They were in fact the most deserving people, she said, adding that if they were excluded then the purpose of the programme would be defeated.
The third condition done away with, she said, related to the applicant and the receiver of the assistance being the same.
The computerised processing system rejected many applications on the basis of this condition. This also excluded many deserving poor persons who did not have male members in the family and the woman who was to receive the financial assistance herself had applied for the aid.
After removing these conditions, more than 400,000 applications, which had been rejected in the first scrutiny, would be reprocessed and considered eligible if they met the remaining criteria, she said.
Ms Raja said that the programme was computerised and totally transparent. At present, she said, more than 2.2 million families were receiving the financial aid which would be raised to 5 million by June next year.
She said that a poverty census had also been launched to identify the poor. About 15 districts — three districts from each province and one each from Azad Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Federally Administered Tribal Areas — have already been surveyed.
Pakistan Census Organisation, Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund and National Rural Support Network have conducted the survey. A similar survey will be carried out in remaining areas of the country from January, she said.
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