Municipal authority: Clifton cantt putting up ‘barrier’ for transparency

Token system aims to edge out ‘agents’.

KARACHI: The Cantonment Board Clifton isn’t perhaps best known for its public dealings but its CEO, Adil Rafi Siddiqui, is trying to change that — ironically by putting a buffer between his staff and residents.

His aim is to discourage agents and middlemen from profiting from what should be a free service, based on his observation of how the office’s culture had developed. And so, in about two weeks the CBC’s public facilitation office will open at their Khayaban-e-Rahat location.

“We are trying to create a disconnect between visitors and staff,” he told The Express Tribune at his office on Tuesday. The problem was that people would wander into the CBC office looking lost and a staffer or agent or middleman would take advantage of it.

A Qmatic customer flow management system will be installed to help reduce the dealings between the staff who are supposed to work behind the scenes. It will reduce the chances of corruption in that sense.

Siddiqui, who has served as CEO at arguably the most sensitive cantonment of the country, Rawalpindi, has been calibrating the working of the Clifton cantonment since he was posted here July 2012. He is a grade 19 officer, a ‘civilian’ who entered service via the CSS system in 1996.

When you ask him what is the difference between running the cantonments of Rawalpindi and Karachi, Siddiqui’s look turns dead serious. “They are much more aware here,” he says, referring to Clifton. In fact, CBC is the only cantonment out of nearly 50 in Pakistan that has the highest number of committees (10) with public representation. The citizen complaint committee, for example, sits down every 15 days with the staff and goes through all the complaints people have made to monitor if they have been addressed.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2014.