BISP’s beneficiary families to be 7 million in August

Chairperson Benazir Income Support Programme Farzana Raja has said the number of beneficiary families registered with the BISP will rise up to 7 million in the next month, while 96 per cent of the nationwide poverty survey has already been completed and till now more than 5.4 million families have been enrolled with the programme.
She was addressing the cheques distributing ceremony at the Governor’s House Lahore under the Waseela-e-Haq Scheme of the BISP. Cheques were distributed among 263 women belonging to various districts of the Punjab. The PPP provincial leadership, parliamentarians, workers and the cheque-recipient females were also present. Federal Minister Samina Khalid Ghurki, Makhdoom Shahab-ud-Din, Imtiaz Safdar Warriach, Altaf Qureshi, Sami Ullah Khan, Shaukat Mahmood Basra, Tanvir Ashraf Kaira and Sajida Mir were prominent.
Farzana Raja also mentioned that the PPP was a movement of giving the rights of the people at their doorsteps and the BISP was successfully advancing this mission. She lauded the efforts and vision of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani for advancing the mission of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto. She said Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto had sacrificed her life to serve the people of Pakistan and to protect their rights. “Hence,” she said, “we will not allow anybody to create hurdles between the poor people of Pakistan and the BISP which is established to serve them. We will achieve the mission of Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto of making Pakistan a welfare state,” she added.
The Chairperson BISP further said all the families registered with the BISP were being included in the balloting under Waseela-e-Haq. Besides this, she said, every registered family was being covered by life insurance of Rs One lac and a member from each registered family would be imparted with vocational/technical training under Waseela-e-Rozgar initiative. She mentioned that some elements were busy in spreading baseless rumours and allegations against the BISP. “However, these facts are befitting responses that till now, more than Rs 88 billion have been distributed among the poor of the country by BISP and only Rs 25 billion have been distributed among the families recommended by the parliamentarians belonging to PPP. Likewise, more than Rs 13 billion has been distributed on the recommendations of the parliamentarians belonging to the party of Mian Nawaz Sharif,” she said, while announcing on the occasion that during coming September and October, one million children of the beneficiary families of the BISP would be sent to school. She further added that on the directions of the president and the prime minister of Pakistan, measures were being taken to dole out all the financial assistance among the beneficiary families through Benazir Smart Card instead of post offices.
Governor Punjab Sardar Latif Ahmed Khosa said the BISP had been declared as a most transparent programme in the social sector by the various prestigious institutions of the world. He added that the BISP had introduced state of the art technology to serve and facilitate the poor of the country and had proved that Pakistan was not a backward country. He concluded that the present democratic government would complete its term of five years and would keep serving the people of Pakistan.