Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday formally inaugurated ‘Ehsaas Ration Portal’ in an effort to provide essential food items to deserving families across the country amid coronavirus lockdown.
The Ehsaas Ration portal is a donor-beneficiary linking system for Ration distribution. It has been set up to enable the private sector to reach the most vulnerable. 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 will 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 program. After signing data privacy agreements, beneficiary information will be shared with donors to ensure disbursement of food ration packs or cash equivalent to beneficiaries.
The government will ensure one person from family gets benefit and will monitor delivery on a sample basis. The private sector will be responsible for establishing 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 do 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 Ration Program i.e. For-profit private organizations and Not-for-profit private organizations. Their eligibly criteria are posted on the website https://rashan.pass.gov.pk/ .
Government is starting with large corporate donors with annual revenue of at least PKR 2 billion willing to donate at least PKR 10 Million in Ration packs or cash equivalent. Similarly, NGOs approved by Ministry of Interior and EAD willing to donate PKR 2 billion are invited to participate at this stage.