Program to keep the Poor, Poor!

Many will argue about the uniqueness of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), few will dare to highlight the fundamental issue associated the overall program, which does little for improving the overall quality of life of the individuals.  While, the words can be tweaked and one can find enough marketers to sell their entity, the fact remains the BISP program has done little to end the poor’s misery.

The program is more in line with keeping the poor, poor and is funded by the money, which surely can be utilized in a more efficient manner to generate the economical activity that ultimately would have contributed in improving the poor’s quality of life.

Instead, we find ourselves with a cash laden entity that strangely is duplicating the roles of many existing departments.  It does not require much pondering to understand that the issues lie within the underlying policy and more importantly the thought behind the program.

Initially, what started as a poverty-ending program deviated from its main purpose to become a money donating activity.  If donating the money was the only purpose of the program, why did not the public sector banks or the financial institutions given the task of distributing the money.  A major chunk of the program is related to giving away an appropriate sum of money to the beneficiaries.  Realistically speaking, the token money provided to the individual does not really address the subject’s livelihood needs for the month.

Having said so, for a moment think if the same chunk of money was spent on developing some infrastructure of any kind, in any location of the country and the subsequent economical activity.  Such steps not only would have helped to improve lives of the poor but would also have helped to maintain or check the poverty rate of the country.

Interestingly, since the inception of this world acclaimed program, the poverty level in the country has increased instead of decreasing. This further supports the notion of mis management of the large sum of the money in the name of the poverty ending activity.

Let us explore few other possibilities, which can be done by spending the half sum of the same money.  The government could have given away the free vegetable seeds to the masses, which can be grown by them to address to their food requirement; promoted kitchen gardening, facilitated the farmers with respect to bringing down the input costs that ultimately would have helped in lowering, maintaining the prices of essential commodities. Additionally, the huge non cultivate able areas of land can be brought into use , which later can be distributed to the poor as a permanent mean for their survival .

However, unfortunately none of this has happened, and even after spending billions of rupees, the poor shall remain the poor.

 

 

Posted by Abdul Basit Abbasi on Oct 19 2011. Filed under Opinion, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry