Islamabad
Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection Dr Sania Nishtar has said that as many as 29,961 individuals have been removed from the list of Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) beneficiaries following the data cleaning exercise.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Dr Sania Nishtar said that these individuals have been made ineligible for receiving the cash assistance as per the availability of more data last year. She said among those removed from the BISP’s list of beneficiaries include 15,326 pensioners, 273 government employees, 9,991 high-income individuals, and 4,371 employees of autonomous agencies. Earlier in 2019, 820,165 individuals were removed from the BISP’s list of beneficiaries, out of which 142,556 were government servants.
In July 2020, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) chapter of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) also completed its investigations against government employees who were allegedly involved in a scam where they misused the BISP. The agency had lodged cases against 24 government officials for misusing their authority to steal from the programme that was meant to offer a financial lifeline to the poorest of the poor.
A government audit of the programme found that out of the 820,165 beneficiaries who had been disqualified, 14,730 were government employees and were not eligible to receive cheques under the programme.
The data further showed the number of beneficiaries who travelled abroad more than once stood at 10,476. Similarly, spouses of 166,319 beneficiaries had travelled abroad more than once. The BISP also removed 692 people who owned at least one or more vehicles, while 43,746 were culled from the list because their spouses owned one or more cars. —TLTP
