The Benazir Income Support Programme is undergoing drastic changes. Last month, Dr Sania Nishtar, the special assistant to prime minister on social protection and poverty alleviation and BISP chairperson, announced the decision to remove 820,165 “undeserving” beneficiaries from the BISP database — as their standard of living was found above the criteria set for ‘the poor’.

The list of women excluded is long: 127,826 recipients were spouses of government employees; over 160,000 recipients had travelled abroad at least once, while the spouses of more than 361,000 recipients had travelled abroad at least once, and almost 45,000 recipients had a car registered in their name or in the name of their spouse.

Overall, the removal of 820,165 recipients will save the government Rs 16 billion per year.

Dr Nishtar has numerous internationally-recognised accomplishments to her credit in the fields of public health and governance. One would like to believe that the process she is supervising is reliable. For now, leading poverty experts in the country are casting doubts on the criteria used to exclude almost 14 percent of the beneficiaries. Dr Kaiser Bengali, the first head of BISP, has strongly condemned the removal of 800,000 plus beneficiaries from the roster. — “It is abject insensitivity on the part of the government and its functionaries,” he has said.

Experts say the criteria are riddled with glitches. “Many poor households, particularly in high migrant populations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have family members who have passports. This doesn’t necessarily mean the household is not poor and vulnerable. The idea that the poor do not have small assets is not fair either, and this has been demystified in numerous academic studies around the world,” says Rehan R. Jamil, a PhD candidate at Brown University. His dissertation examines the political origins and citizenship impacts of the BISP.

In his PhD survey work, he has found many BISP beneficiaries with small assets like livestock, televisions and bicycles etc. However, “they are deprived on many other dimensions due to structural poverty which prevents them from gaining long-term employment and access to productive assets like land or capital or investing in their children’s education,” he adds.

Talking at a press conference on December 27, Dr Nishtar claimed that the government had devised special eligibility criteria. She said the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) had also been taken on board and that the decision to remove the names from the BISP list had been taken after the approval of the federal cabinet. But the decision to exclude a huge number of beneficiaries seems to have been made in haste or under political pressure.

“Many poor households, particularly in high migrant districts in KP have family members who have passports. This doesn’t necessarily mean the household is not poor and vulnerable. The idea that the poor do not have small assets is not true either, and this has been demystified in numerous academic studies,” says Rehan R. Jamil.

For one, it has been announced before the completion of the ongoing National Social and Economic Registry, the door-to-door survey at the national level, aimed to calculate the census-based poverty prevalence. Ideally any major policy shift should have been announced after the ongoing NSER update was completed.

The NSER is the most important national database for poverty in Pakistan and the BISP is the first programme in the country to use a poverty registry as a basis for targeting. “This is a key design feature that separates BISP from other social welfare programmes in Pakistan like Zakat and Bait-ul Maal,” says Jamil.

The revisions in the BISP database announced by Dr Nistar also include a compensation package for the people who often fall victim to indiscriminate Indian firing and shelling from across the LoC. “More than 79,992 houses remain in the line of Indian firing and shelling and the government has decided to provide relief under Benazir Income Support Programme to 13,982 families living on the LoC,” she said at the press conference.

This clearly reads like a political statement. Besides, Kaiser Bengali says, “the original database of the BISP included women from all over the country, including Azad Jammu and Kashmir.”

The BISP has always been criticized as a tool for gaining political mileage. But its design and targeting do not support this perception. Since its introduction in 2008, the programme, despite allegations of political interference and favouritism, has grown rather quickly. Over the last 10 years, the amount of the stipend has increased from Rs 1,000 a month to Rs 5,000 every quarter and the number of recipients from roughly 2 million to more than 5 million. It has gained international credibility through third party evaluations for its targeting and implementation. This year the programme is expected to disburse a total of Rs180 billion to the poorest of the poor women in Pakistan.

For the success of any social safety net, selection of beneficiaries must be non-discretionary and institutionalised. It must have predictable and consistent rules of inclusion and exclusion. Presently, it seems, “the government’s focus is on errors of inclusion (those wrongly included in the programme, in their view). However, they should equally be concerned about errors of exclusion (those who are not in the safety net like seasonal workers and nomads, or those who do not have CNICs,” says Jamil.

Of course, no social programme as large and complex as the BISP will be totally free from leakages and errors in inclusion any time soon. This makes it all the more important that the beneficiaries are selected in a systematic and non-politicised way.