Federal Minister and Benazir Income Support Programme Chairperson, Farzana Raja has said that some people have made 'welfare of people' a cliché after retirement and living a lavish and luxurious life, such elements cannot deceive the people of Pakistan by these tricks. She was speaking at a cheque distribution ceremony under Waseela-e-Haq scheme of BISP held here Saturday.
She said President Asif Ali Zardari has saved Pakistan at a crucial juncture by raising the slogan 'Pakistan Khappy' (we need Pakistan) and his adversaries will have to face disappointment again, as their evil design against him are bound to fail. "PPP is a political party of those who have made sacrifices for the rights of the people of Pakistan. For those who are terming our indiscriminate services to the people of the country as a political bribe, we want to make it clear that we will keep on serving the people despite such mean allegations," she added.
According to her, some so-called leaders are talking of service and people at the final stage of their life and they must understand that serving the masses is a continuous process and one has to make lot of sacrifices. So for Rs 36 billion have been distributed among the beneficiary families from Punjab and out of this amount, Rs 13 billion is distributed among the families recommended by MPs of PML (N).
After schemes like Waseela-e-Haq and Waseela-e-Rozgar, BISP has launched Waseela-e-Taleem. It aims to impart education to children belonging to poor beneficiary families. They have planned to enrol one million children in the school till April 2012 and 300,000 out of them would be from Punjab.
The file regarding Waseela-e-Taleem MoU with Punjab government is still pending with them. However, they hope that Punjab CM would not ruin the future of these poor children from the province for the sake of his personal ego. Farzana Raja said keeping in view the transparent mechanism of BISP and its effectiveness India is also considering replicating BISP, which is a huge success for them.
She said the organisations like the World Bank and USAID have also endorsed the transparency of BISP. She informed the audience that DFID and the World Bank have recently pledged to provide US $350 million for Waseela-e-Taleem initiative, which shows their trust in the programme.