Corruption detected in BISP: Monetary assistance to 125,000 women halted

ISLAMABAD - The government has halted monetary assistance to 125,000 women after millions of rupees corruption unearthed in the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), sources said on Friday.

The BISP was launched by the PPP government in 2008 to provide monetary assistance to the needy women throughout the country to run their domestic affairs.

During door-to-door checking, it was revealed that over 55,000 fake women in Sindh, 44,000 in Punjab, 16,000 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and 6,000 fake women in Baluchistan had been received monetary assistance under the BISP. Following the corruption allegations, a departmental inquiry has been initiated against 69 officials of the BISP programme.

According to details issued by the interior ministry on Friday, over 5.2 million deserving women from all four provinces, AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan were compensated Rs466 billion (Rs466 Arab) in the past five years, reports Online News Agency.

After a fake identity card was identified by BISP office in the federal capital in 2014, the case management system halted monetary assistance to over hundred thousand women in February 2015. The eliminate corruption from the BISP; an agreement was signed with the national database and regularity authority (NADRA).

Under the accord, the Nadra launched a special application form to clear the dubious women from the list. Under the reconfirmation process, 563,000 women appeared deserving while the remaining 125,714 were only present in the record.

The record also revealed that 1,660 women in AJK and 1,050 in Gilgit-Baltistan were appeared bogus.-Online