Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is exercising utmost vigilance and care in clearing the last tranche to the service providers as it wants to ensure maximum transparency and proper utilization of public funds, said BISP Secretary Shabbir Ahmed during a meeting with representatives of training providers and institutes to listen to the grievances of training providers, to share with them the stance of the BISP, and to assure the payment of the genuine claims. The training providers were also apprised of the decision of the BISP Management Board regarding tracer study and they agreed to the payment after completion of tracer study.
The BISP secretary told the participants that the study is ongoing and the payments claims of service providers will be processed accordingly. Thereafter, due claims would be processed for payments. The current management is also working on processing the payments of those service providers/training institutes in 9 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where Tracer Study has been completed.
He further added that BISP will soon hold another meeting with the service providers/training institutes of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to share the results of Tracer Study.
The Waseela-e-Rozgar (WeR) program of Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) was launched in September 2011 and vocational training started in February 2012. Initially, there was a target of imparting vocational training to 70,000 beneficiaries. However, 57,817 beneficiaries have been provided training under WeR. So far, BISP Management has released Rs 1800 million for this programme out of which Rs 799 million were paid to service providers as cost of training and examination fee.
Accordingly, on the basis of a decision by the BISP Management Board, the BISP has initiated a Tracer Study to evaluate the performance of training provider which includes verification of the institute, attendance of trainees and quality of training etc, to validate the trainings imparted to beneficiaries. The tracer study, once completed, would be helpful in processing the claims of the service providers. BISP management is doing its best efforts to finalize the payment but it cannot violate the instructions of the BISP Management Board.