Bengali terms government decision 'abject insensitivity'

Dr Kaiser Bengali, the first Head of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), has condemned the removal of over 800,000 beneficiaries from the roster of BISP, terming it "abject insensitivity on the part of the government and its functionaries".

He has also questioned the argument that many of those beneficiaries were supporters of opposition political parties, labelling them as "particularly petty", adding that no matter whose supporter a beneficiary's family is, the poor are the poor and deserve a compassionate treatment. The word, compassion, however, appears to be missing from the vocabulary of the current dispensation in Islamabad, he remarked.

Dr Bengali, who designed the original BISP programme, has also explained that the original programme was entirely computer-based and had ensured that the undeserving, as defined on the basis of the NADRA database, were omitted from the programme. These included government employees, those holding passports or NICOP, those with accounts in foreign banks, etc.

"The efficiency of the selection approach was tested when several government and opposition parliamentarians in 2008 complained of their nominees being rejected for not meeting the computer-based criteria," he said. He adds the distortion in BISP beneficiary selection process set in with the replacement of the original criteria with a survey based one, called the Proxy Means Test, introduced by the World Bank.

"The new approach was conceptually and operationally flawed. The survey was contracted out and which was sub-contracted multiple times; with the result that the statistical integrity of the survey was compromised. The approach also introduced personal biases in the responses, as it was easy to, for example, write down a bicycle instead of a motor-cycle or a car," he said.

Giving an example, Dr. Bengali maintains that a former MNA in southern Punjab handed a list to the local enumerator, who was his son, requiring him to fill in the forms himself accordingly.

"Former councillor in Tank called a village meeting and coached the audience on how to respond to the questionnaire in order to qualify," he added. Dr Bengali has claimed that there were scores of such problems that he was personally aware of and has held the World Bank responsible for the distortions in the programme.