PM launches ‘Ehsaas Rashan Portal’ to help deserving people

ISLAMABAD: In an attempt to give necessary food items to the poor families across the country amid COVID-19 lockdown, Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday formally launched ‘Ehsaas Rashan Portal’.

On this occasion, praising the initiative, PM imran Khan said that the Pakistani nation always faced every challenge with enormous courage and commitment. The PM said that the nation always supported the vulnerable segments of the society generously in testing times.

According to a press statement issued by PM office media wing, the PM observed that the portal would facilitate the donors and philanthropists to reach to the poor people, besides ensuring establishment of a just, transparent and merit based distribution system for necessary food items.

Earlier, briefing the prime minister, the Special Assistant to PM on Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation Dr Sania Nishtar said that said that Ehsaas Rashan Portal will assist philanthropists and charity organizations in reaching out to poor people and providing ration to poor segments of the society.

She maintained that under this portal, it will be ensured that the ration reaches to the deserving families.

According to a press release, the role of the government will be to facilitate match-making between donors and beneficiaries (e.g., on geographic basis) and provide data of eligible beneficiaries to donors.

Donors and potential beneficiaries will register on the Ehsaas Rashan Portal: https://rashan.pass.gov.pk/.

Beneficiaries’ information should be validated, and eligibility determined using Ehsaas data.

Donors will be evaluated against a specific eligibility criterion to ensure only trustworthy, tax compliant, and at-scale organizations become partners of the programme.

After signing data privacy agreements, beneficiary information will be shared with donors to ensure the disbursement of food ration packs or cash equivalent to beneficiaries.

The government will ensure one person from a family gets the benefit and will monitor delivery on a sample basis.

The private sector will be responsible for establishing a mechanism for sourcing and disbursement of ration or cash equivalent for beneficiaries.

Donors will be given a list of parameters to select from to identify which segment of the beneficiaries they want to support. The parameters include area of residence district/tehsil, gender of the beneficiary, etc.

Based on the chosen parameters a subset of beneficiaries will be identified from a larger pool, who may then benefit based on a first-in-first-out basis.

There are two categories of donors that the government is looking towards initially in the Ehsaas Rashan Programme i.e. for-profit private organizations and not-for-profit private organizations. Their eligibility criteria are posted on the website https://rashan.pass.gov.pk/.