For millions of families across Pakistan, the Benazir Income Support Programme is not a policy debate. It is the difference between eating and not eating. Between keeping a daughter in school and pulling her out. Between surviving a flood and being swallowed by one.

So when whispers circulate inside Islamabad that BISP may be scaled back or devolved wholesale to the provinces, the anxiety those rumours trigger is not abstract. It is visceral. And it is justified.

The justification being offered is fiscal. The figure most commonly cited is Rs845 billion, a large number that sounds alarming until you ask what it is actually doing.

Before Pakistan treats BISP as just another line item to trim, it must answer a more fundamental question: What does a state owe its citizens? And when the state struggles financially, who should bear that burden first: the powerful or the poor?

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

Lost in the rumours is a basic fact: BISP is not collapsing. It is growing.

In fiscal year 2024–25, the programme disbursed roughly Rs592 billion in unconditional cash transfers to nearly 9.9 million low-income families. The proposed budget allocation has risen from approximately Rs694 billion to Rs845 billion, specifically to keep stipends meaningful amid punishing inflation. The beneficiary count is on track to exceed 10 million households, with hundreds of thousands of additional women entering the system for the first time.

This is not the picture of a government retreating from social protection. It is the picture of a government acknowledging that economic conditions have grown more desperate and trying, however imperfectly, to respond.

Pakistan today faces compounding crises: runaway inflation, recurrent climate disasters, food insecurity, a contracting formal economy, and an expanding informal labour force. To weaken the country’s primary shock-absorbing safety net precisely in this moment would not be reform. It would be strategic abandonment.

What Pakistan Built, and Why It Matters

Critics of BISP often speak as though social protection programmes are inherently wasteful. What they rarely acknowledge is how sophisticated and technically formidable Pakistan’s system has actually become.

Through the National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER), linked to NADRA’s digital identity infrastructure, Pakistan quietly assembled one of the largest integrated poverty-targeting systems in the developing world. Nearly 40 million households have been registered and assessed through a data-driven mechanism covering approximately 84 per cent of the population.

Before this existed, social assistance in Pakistan was fragmented, discretionary, politically manipulated, and routinely captured by patronage networks. The NSER introduced rules-based targeting that dramatically improved both reach and precision.

Many countries, far wealthier than Pakistan, are still trying to build what Pakistan already has

Many........

© The Friday Times