BISP disburses Rs 1.16 billion by mobile phone banking

ISLAMABAD: Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) has disbursed an amount of Rs 1.16 billion through Mobile Phone Banking, ensuring faster and more reliable cash transfer to its beneficiaries.

Mobile Phone Banking introduced for the first time in the history of the country was initially launched in the districts including Larkana, Battagram, Layyah, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

An official of BISP told APP that free mobile phones have been distributed among 107,000 beneficiaries so far, however, the project will be shortly launched in districts Barkhan, Poonch and Ghanche.

The purpose of introducing mobile phone banking was aimed at eliminating human involvement in disbursement of cash to the deserving families, taking along the underprivileged segment of the society to the new era by offering technology based systems, the official said.

BISP is playing pivotal role in eradicating poverty as well as socio-economic uplift of the beneficiary families through its initiatives.

The programme has gained great success in social sector by making its outreach to almost seven million poor families to provide them with financial assistance and making them self-reliant.

The door to door poverty survey to identify the poor segment of society has been completed in most parts of the country while it is under process in FATA, Bajour and Kurram Agencies. The BISP will hopefully reduce 20 per cent poverty in the next five to ten years through various schemes.

Under `Waseela-e-Haq' initiative, the BISP is providing an amount of Rs 300,000 to the registered beneficiaries through a transparent manner.

The amount is given as soft loan to the beneficiaries to run small businesses. Over 22 Waseela-e-Haq draws have taken place so far and 10,974 beneficiary families have been declared eligible to receive this returnable financial assistance.

Under `Waseela-e-Rozgar', the BISP is planning to impart vocational and technical training to the female beneficiary or her nominee under this initiative and training has been conducted for master trainers in 50 traites in collaboration with China.

As many as 150,000 beneficiaries will be given technical training to produce skilled manpower for the country every year which will enable these families to become self-reliant.

Under Waseela-e-Sehat, the beneficiary families are entitled to receive Rs. 100,000 in case of death of their bread earner, under the `Life Insurance' scheme and around 3.1 million families have already been insured in this process.

However, Health insurance has been initially launched in Faisalabad district which will soon be scaled up in other districts.

After successful launch of these projects, BISP is now all set to enrol more than one million children of beneficiary families in schools by April next year under its `Waseela-e-Taleem' Programme.

Three children from each beneficiary family can be enrolled in the schools for free education and the deserving families will be given cash grant on the condition of ensuring registration of their children at schools, the official said. An amount of Rs 200 per child will be given as conditional cash grant for each beneficiary family under this initiative.

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2010