EDITORIAL: In a country where poverty levels stand at a staggering 44.7 percent, 11 million people face acute food insecurity and 40 percent of children under five suffer from stunted growth — crises that are bound to worsen following the devastating floods that have submerged much of the nation — mechanisms for providing targeted subsidies to the poorest sections need to be not only efficient and impactful, but also rigorously insulated against irregularities and corruption. That, as recent disturbing revelations about the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and the Poverty Alleviation Division make abundantly clear, is too much to expect from a government machinery that is chronically inept and frequently complicit in the gross mismanagement and fraud surrounding subsidy disbursements.
As the Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) informed the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee on August 28, more than Rs37 million was embezzled from the BISP by hundreds of government officials — shockingly including 630 officers of Grade 19, 85 of Grade 20, and even some from the highest echelon of Grade 22, with disbursements also extending to the spouses of senior officials.
Further disclosures of financial mismanagement revealed that Rs80.508 million from the BISP was disbursed to ineligible individuals, while another Rs13.72 million was siphoned off through fake biometric verifications across multiple tehsils. Worse still, 84 deceased individuals continued to receive BISP payments amounting to Rs15 million over the past two years, which is a damning indictment of the sheer incompetence and lax oversight that plague the programme. Overall, audit reports of the Poverty Alleviation Division for 2020-21 to 2022-23 uncovered financial irregularities worth an astounding Rs96 billion, including Rs800 million in 2021-22 alone, disbursed under the Ehsaas Emergency Cash Programme to individuals who were ineligible for assistance.
It is important to note that it is not only corruption and deliberate embezzlement that are draining Pakistan’s social security systems, but also the chronic weaknesses of ill-equipped mechanisms that repeatedly enroll ineligible individuals onto recipient lists, the absence of robust data verification frameworks that remain open to abuse, the lack of meaningful accountability and the non-existence of a reliable process for ensuring recoveries in cases of erroneous disbursements. This is nothing short of criminal, given that the issues plaguing the BISP and other programmes under the Poverty Alleviation Division are anything but new.
Earlier this year, fraud amounting to Rs141 billion was unearthed in BISP disbursements for FY2023-24, with an audit report citing payments to individuals without valid CNICs, misuse of educational stipends and unauthorised cash withdrawals from beneficiaries’ accounts.
Meanwhile, last year it had come to light that spouses of 28,500 Sindh government officials had been receiving BISP payments, underscoring how easily ineligible individuals could infiltrate beneficiary lists. Indeed, as far back as 2019, over 820,000 ineligible recipients had to be struck off the BISP rolls nationwide, a stark reminder that this is not a new anomaly but a long-running pattern of systemic failure and entrenched corruption that despite repeated exposure over the past six years has yet to be meaningfully addressed.
In light of the latest revelations of corruption in subsidy disbursements, while 879 FIRs have been filed against alleged culprits and 292 arrests made, this is clearly insufficient. What is urgently required are more robust and transparent systems that help in not only preventing irregularities in the first place but also in detecting them in real time, rather than long after millions intended for the poorest citizens have already been siphoned away.
Amid Pakistan’s overwhelming challenges of poverty, food insecurity and women’s disempowerment, the BISP — our largest poverty alleviation initiative — as well as other social security programmes cannot be allowed to falter through institutional failure and graft.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025