People of Chitral express resentment about the unjust allotment of Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) cards

The people of Chitral have expressed their resentment about the unjust allotment of Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) cards to the non-deserving persons in the district at the cost of the indigent and the poor.

Talking to media, a number of local leaders complained that last year the BISP had conducted extensive household survey in Chitral through Aga Khan Rural Support Program to determine the needy and poor people to allot the cards
afresh but the needy were kept totally deprived this time as well.

Shah Murad Baig, district information secretary of PPP said that the people of Chitral had pinned great hopes with the much trumpeted survey and had expected a fair distribution of the cards for financial assistance but all their
hopes dashed to the ground when the revised list were found to contain the beneficiaries who did not deserve the assistance by any definition.

“The mass scale anomaly in the compilation of beneficiaries’ list is likely to bring a bad name to the government which is trying to use it as lever to augment its popularity among the people”, Mr. Baig said.

The district president of Peoples’ Students Federation (PSF), Qazi Waqar Iqbal also expressed similar views and demanded of the government to annul the list, which deprived the poor.

“I will meet Farzana Raja, in charge of BISP and bring to her knowledge the mass anomalies in the list,” he said.

Maulana Afzal, a renowned social worker said that that the faulty lists and thereby unjust distribution of BISP cards has caused heart burning among the people of Chitral and they lost their lost their confidence on the credibility
of the program.

He complained that the Pakistan Baitul Maal has already stopped its assistance to the poor as its funds have been diverted to the BISP because of which the magnitude of despondency is increasing in the society.

A complainant said that he knew a family in which the names of a woman and her daughter were included in the list whose husband had recently retired from a nationalized bank where he served as an officer.

A former nazim of union council Broze, Abdul Haq lamented that the people suffering from abject poverty are eking out for their sustenance but the BISP cards have been bestowed upon the influential allegedly having political affiliations.

Abdul Haq warned that if the injustice meted out to the poor were not redressed, then it would lead to anarchy in the society, as the poor people will rise in revolt.

He also criticized the surveying team of AKRSP for posting fictitious values in the database of the survey system to benefit certain people of their choice.

Regarding the survey process in the district, an official of Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) told media that they had just gathered the data in the given format of BISP, which was designed to measure accurately the magnitude
of poverty in every household in the district.

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Posted by Sonia Bashir on Nov 10 2011. Filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry