‘Ehsaas serves 7.512m families in a month, distributes Rs91.611 billion’

Islamabad: Ever since May 8, which marked commencement of disbursements to beneficiaries under category-3 of the Ehsaas Emergency Cash programme, Rs1.961 billion have been paid to 163,419 category-3 beneficiaries identified through the district administrations.

Concurrently, payments to category-2 beneficiaries are also underway. So far, 2.945 million category-2 beneficiaries have received Rs35.347 billion, and payments are still ongoing. Category-2 recipients had expressed demand through the 8171 SMS service that closed on April 19, and their eligibility is being ascertained through the databases of the National Socioeconomic Registry 2010 and 2020.

The Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation Dr. Sania Nishtar remarked, “The emergency cash transfers are providing purchasing power to labour class to buy food rations and meet their needs.” Talking about the delivery of final messages to applicants, she added, “All applicants of Ehsaas Emergency Cash programme who fall under categories II and III will get the final SMS messages from 8171 regarding payment or rejection, based on their eligibility by the end of current week.” Payments to category-1 that includes regular Kafaalat beneficiaries have almost been completed with Rs54.303 billion paid out to 4.403 million beneficiaries.

Cumulatively, so far, 7.512 million deserving families under categories I, II and III have collected financial assistance of Rs12,000 each, that sums up to roughly Rs91.611 billion. This amount has been disbursed among daily wagers, piece-rate workers, and labourers till May 11, since the beginning of the payment operation on April 9. Ehsaas has set up more than 10,000 payment sites to facilitate safe and fully biometric payments worth Rs144 billion to 12 million deserving families.

According to provincial and regional breakdowns available on the online Ehsaas disbursements portal, as of today, an amount of Rs17.229 billion has been distributed among 1.393 beneficiaries of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Rs38.498 billion among 3.161 million beneficiaries in Punjab and Rs29.025 billion among 2.401 million beneficiaries in Sindh.

Till today, an amount of Rs1.578 billion has been disbursed among 126,414 beneficiaries in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Rs4.277 billion among 349,517 beneficiaries of Baluchistan, Rs0.649 billion among 50,834 beneficiaries in Gilgit-Baltistan and Rs0.353 among 29,058 beneficiaries of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).