Why this pseudo deadline of March 16 for suggestions to improve the government’s performance?
KARACHI: Here are my eight suggestions in response to a government of Pakistan advertisement of February 27, 2015, seeking suggestions for taking its “performance to new heights”.
1) Do not give any ads that are paid out of the taxpayers’ money and carry personal photographs of individuals — such as the prime minister’s irrelevant picture in this very advertisement.
2) Insulate and extricate the police and bureaucracy from the clutches of political interference.
3) Do away with all affidavit and attestation requirements from all documents submitted by citizens. An individual’s own undertaking should be good enough.
4) Eliminate or drastically reduce the need for citizens to visit government offices. Citizens should be able to communicate with government offices on phone, fax, letter or email. The government should respond and deliver all documents by post instead of asking people to come for their collection.
5) Introduce telephonic/electronic money transfer for payments of all government dues. Individuals should not be required to visit offices or banks for depositing government dues.
6) Eliminate all support staff associated with the bureaucracy such as qasids, naib qasids, clerks, typists, peons and drivers at all levels. Every officer, regardless of his rank, should be his own typist, qasid and office boy.
7) Computerise (with fool-proof back-ups) all files and records and make them transparent and available on the internet. (Except those that are private or confidential).
8) Completely do away with the concept of official vehicles. Federal and provincial government officials in Pakistan (mis)use over 150,000 official cars while the UK government uses only 85 — of which 13 are allocated to ministers and the rest reside in a common car pool.
Lastly, why this pseudo deadline of March 16 for suggestions to improve the government’s performance? Are the citizens and the state expected to stop thinking beyond this date? Progress is a continuous process and not a one-time project. You may wish to create a process for receiving ‘reform related’ inputs from citizens on an ongoing basis.
Naeem Sadiq
Published in The Express Tribune, March 4th, 2015.
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