BPS takes away entitlement of 4,145 families to cash aid
Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
A total of 4,145 families in the city had been disqualified as recipients of the central government scheme to provide direct compensation to the poor for the recent fuel price hikes, an official said on Monday.
Director of the Social Statistics Division at the Jakarta Statistics Agency (BPS Jakarta), Rusman Heriawan, said that further verification found that the families were actually ineligible for inclusion in the assistance program.
He said that the BPS had also added 6,200 new low-income families in the capital to the list of people eligible to receive Fuel Compensation Cards (KKB), which enabled them to receive Rp 300,000 every three months from certain post offices.
"From around 101,219 families who are on the BPS list, 4,145, or about 4 percent, are not eligible for the cash aid. We have also revoked another 309 cards as the families have moved to away or the households no longer exist," Rusman said as quoted by Antara.
The BPS had yet to distribute the cards to the 4,145 families affected, added Rusman.
He said that the BPS would ask state postal operator PT Posindo, which is tasked with paying out the assistance to the entitled low-income families, to remove the names of the 4,145 ineligible households and add the 6,200 newly entitled families.
Since the start of the distribution of the cards on Sept. 26, so far, according to Rusman, around 93,300 families or about 92 percent of the total number of entitled families had already received the cards.
Due to a lack of staff, the BPS could only verify the data on 20 percent of the families on the list, while the remaining 80 percent had been verified by local youth organization Karang Taruna and family welfare movement groups (PKK) in each subdistricts.
Rusman explained that the government was now drawing up a plan for unregistered poor residents of Jakarta. The BPS has so registered 4,000 of these families, including families living under bridges and along riverbanks.
"But they will not be entitled to receive the cash assistance ... The government is still formulating an appropriate poverty alleviation program for them," he added.
The registration of low-income families by the BPS was carried out between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15, and involved 205,028 BPS officers.
There are 14 criteria used as yardsticks for assessing whether a household is poor, including daily income and expenditure on healthcare, food and clothing.
If a family meets at least eight of the criteria, then it is entitled to receive Rp 100,000 per month, which is distributed every three months.
The first disbursement of the money was for the October to December period. The second disbursement is expected to be carried out early next year.
The Jakarta administration has decided to periodically evaluate whether the cardholders are still eligible to receive the assistance.
Deputy Governor Fauzi Bowo said over the weekend that poor families who received financial assistance from relatives outside the family unit did not satisfy the set criteria set and would be removed from the list of those entitled.