New initiatives soon to tackle poverty: Official

islamabad — The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) would speedily implement a range of measures in coming months to boost the government efforts to reduce poverty and create new opportunities for vulnerable sections of society.

In an interview, BISP chairperson Dr Sania Nishtar said the ‘Ehsas (compassion) programme’ launched by Prime Minister Imran Khan on March 27 was a priority poverty reduction measure and will focus on four areas and 115 policy actions to reduce inequality, invest in people, and uplift lagging districts.

The programme is aimed at helping the downtrodden and vulnerable segments of society, including the poor, orphans, widows, homeless, disabled, undernourished and jobless.

She said that the Benazir Income Support Programme will execute two new social protection programmes — kifalat (meeting needs) and tahafuz (protection).

The kifalat initiative will ensure financial and digital inclusion of around 6 million women through the one-woman-one-bank account policy. There will be an inflation adjustment in the size of the cash

transfers to the women.

The BISP will add Rs80 billion to the social protection spending in the forthcoming budget and in the next budget 2020-21 there will be a further increase and incrementally the amount would be enhanced to Rs120 billion or one per cent of the GDP with federal and provincial contribution.

The government has recently created the Ministry of Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation Coordination to address current fragmentation of its organizations.

According to the BISP, about 38.8 per cent of people in Pakistan suffer from poverty in one form or the other and 24.4 per cent do not have enough money to meet their food and non-food needs.

Dr Sania said the tahafuz (protection) initiative will be the other programme to protect the poor and vulnerable against financial shocks and will involve a one-time financial assistance in the face of catastrophic events.

It will also provide assistance to poor widows who don’t have any earning children. The programme also aims to provide legal aid to poor families. —