Pakistan’s Benazir Income Support Programme has expanded its Mobile Registration Van fleet from 25 to 32 vehicles, adding seven units with support from Germany’s development cooperation, and used the occasion to highlight a facial recognition option for beneficiaries who cannot complete fingerprint verification. The vans extend the program’s enrollment and payment services to remote areas where beneficiaries would otherwise have to travel to a fixed office.
Each van functions as a mobile service point linked to the national identity system. Staff use the vehicles to handle registration tied to the Computerized National Identity Card issued by the National Database and Registration Authority, bringing the identity check that underpins benefit eligibility to communities far from a BISP tehsil office. The expansion was inaugurated by BISP Chairperson Senator Rubina Khalid alongside a German envoy, marking the latest extension of a fleet that has grown through Pakistan’s partnership with the German development agency GIZ.
The facial recognition facility addresses a recurring problem in biometric benefit systems. Beneficiaries whose fingerprints cannot be read, a common issue among older recipients and people whose prints have worn down through manual labor, can be locked out of payments tied to fingerprint authentication. BISP highlighted facial recognition as the alternative for those cases, letting a beneficiary verify against NADRA records by face when fingerprint matching fails, so that a biometric mismatch does not become a barrier to receiving support.
NADRA has been building face-based fallbacks across Pakistan’s identity infrastructure for exactly this population. The authority introduced a facial recognition certificate for citizens whose fingerprints do not match, and has developed facial recognition for elderly pensioners who struggle with fingerprint scans, the same constituency the BISP vans are meant to reach.
BISP also pointed to a Digital Wallet payment mechanism as part of the same modernization, moving beneficiaries toward digital disbursement rather than cash collection. Taken together, the van fleet, the facial recognition fallback, and the digital wallet describe an effort to widen both the reach of enrollment and the reliability of the identity checks that release payments.
Sources: Business Recorder
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
