Alvi stresses public access to bureaucrats

President Dr Arif Alvi urged civil servants on Wednesday to transform bureaucracy into a service-oriented discipline by increasing efficiency and outreach, especially to the underprivileged and underserved areas of the country.

Addressing the participants of 117th National Management Course (NMC) at the Aiwan-e-Sadr, he said the bureaucracy should focus on providing relief to the people by removing redundant impediments, thus providing hassle-free swift service to the people at their doorsteps.

“The bureaucracy should focus its energies, abilities, knowledge and expertise to provide relief to the people of Pakistan by adopting an open-door policy and improving service delivery to all parts, especially to the people of far-flung areas,” Alvi said, according to a press release issued by the President Secretariat Press Wing.

“Commitment to the welfare of the people should be the central pillar of bureaucracy, which most of the time did not require money but a change in attitudes,” he told the course participants, comprising senior civil servants of different services and occupational groups.

The president stressed the need for reviewing Pakistan’s bureaucratic processes to bring in an exponential increase in its effectiveness, efficiency and outcome with the help of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies.

During the question-answer session, Alvi said that the bureaucracy needed to provide solutions to problems by identifying them, factoring in successful past experiences, benchmarking the best practices around the world and setting key performance indicators with a definite timeline for the achievement of targets.

“Pakistan is facing population growth, which is putting tremendous pressure on our limited resources, however, out-of-box ideas and solutions can help better manage the population growth and thus convert them into an economic and financial asset,” he emphasised.

Replying to another question, the president said that although provinces spent more than 20% of their budgets on education, the quality and quantity of the educational services required substantial improvement.

He underlined the importance of bringing over 20 million out-of-school children into the education system and also called for adopting assistive technology and enabling conditions for over 20 million differently-abled persons to make them economically empowered.

The president said that experience around the world had shown that hybrid and online education systems were more effective in terms of quality and cost and were playing a vital role for the students who could not acquire an in-house education.

He also highlighted the need for improving the justice system by removing backlog and making the provision of justice inexpensive, which would “help streamline our systems and provide speedy relief to the people”.

Meanwhile, the NMC participants and the Rector and faculty members of the National School of Public Policy (NSPP), called on Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial at the Supreme Court, as a part of their inland study tour.

Welcoming the delegation, the chief justice emphasised that the bureaucracy, being executive cadre of the country, was mandated with task of execution of policies, so as to address public grievances and provide them prompt relief.

The chief justice said that delays in decision-making and reluctance to ensure effective service delivery not only overburdened the judiciary but also added to the despondencies and miseries of the people.

(APP WITH INPUT FROM OUT CORRESPONDENT)