LAHORE: The Punjab government has made an important amendment to the conditions of the “Apna Khet, Apna Rozgar” scheme, preparing a new procedure to also declare eligible 31,505 applicants who do not have a poverty score. There had been a risk that deserving landless people would be excluded from the scheme because no poverty score was available for them.
According to documents, a total of 271,015 applications were received for the scheme. Of these, the records of 210,777 applicants were found available in the Punjab Socio-Economic Registry (PSER), while the records of a further 28,740 people were found in the National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER).
In total, therefore, poverty scores are available for 239,510 applicants, while 31,505 applicants have no score in either registry.
The Board of Revenue has prepared a personal economic assessment form for the remaining applicants. Under the proposed procedure, applicants with a poverty score of 32 or below in the PSER or NSER will be eligible, while it has been proposed that those scoring 23 or below in the field survey will also be declared eligible.
According to sources, the Finance Department had raised objections to the transparency and monitoring of the personal economic assessment process and had directed that the surveying authority and the method of verification of records be clarified.
Subsequently, field teams under the supervision of deputy commissioners completed the survey of applicants, and the information was verified at the district level.
According to the Board of Revenue, the personal economic assessment form was prepared in consultation with the Punjab Social Protection Authority and the Punjab Land Records Authority. After the Board of Revenue’s clarification, the Finance Department has also endorsed the proposed amendment.
Proxy means testing — the method behind both the PSER and NSER — assigns households a score based on observable indicators such as housing material, asset ownership, household size and utility connections, rather than on declared income. It is efficient at scale but has a structural blind spot: households that were never enumerated, that moved between survey rounds, or whose head of household lacked a verifiable CNIC-linked address, simply do not appear in the database.
Landless agricultural labourers — precisely the group the scheme is designed to reach — are over-represented among the unenumerated because they are seasonally mobile and frequently live on land owned by others.
The two-track eligibility formula now approved addresses that gap by treating an on-ground survey as a substitute for a registry score, with a stricter numerical threshold of 23 against the registry cut-off of 32. The lower field-survey ceiling reflects the different scoring construction of the two instruments rather than a tougher standard of poverty.
The amendment follows a broader legislative clean-up of land administration, including Punjab’s repeal of the 1960 land consolidation law.
The Finance Department’s initial objection went to the heart of the credibility risk in any survey-based eligibility route: who conducts the assessment, and who verifies it. Placing field teams under deputy commissioners and requiring district-level verification of the collected information is the administrative answer the Board of Revenue has offered, alongside a form jointly designed with the Punjab Social Protection Authority and the Punjab Land Records Authority.
With the Finance Department’s endorsement now in place, the immediate consequence is that a cohort of 31,505 applicants who would otherwise have been screened out by a data gap re-enters the eligibility pool — bringing the number of assessed applicants close to the full 271,015 received.
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