Livestock and dairy: Officials get smartphones to improve e-governance

The phones are equipped with the Vet Inspect software.

LAHORE: The Livestock and Dairy Department has distributed 150 smartphones equipped with the Vet Inspect software among field officials in a bid to improve e-governance, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Punjab Information Technology Board Chairman Umer Saif said the smartphones had been provided to officials responsible for monitoring livestock health and butchers to facilitate the provision of quality meat in line with the standards set by the department across the province. Saif said this would enable the officials to feed data into the software which analysts would be able to access through a dashboard. He said analysts would be able to correlate the information with some indicators such as sale of unstamped meat, staff attendance records and paucity of medicines.

Saif said information regarding 1.3 million farmers’ mobile phone numbers had also been collated in a database. He said the farmers would receive a pre-recorded call from the department explaining ways of increasing milk shelf life, reasons for its rejection and benefits of artificial insemination under the new e-governance regime.

The PITB chairman said livestock constituted the backbone of the province’s economy. He said the sector employed a formidable number of people in addition to providing meat, milk and wool. Saif said the sector’s contribution to the nation’s GDP was around 11 per cent.

“Unfortunately, a large part of the dairy industry operates outside the formal economy…On the other hand, 15-20 per cent of the milk produced in the country is lost due to calving and substandard transport facilities,” Saif said.

He said farmers tended to rely on obsolescent milking methods and traditional supply chains. Saif said most were ignorant of modern methods of boosting livestock productivity. He said increased use of modern technology would empower them by removing entrenched administrative bottlenecks with the help of smart monitoring. 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 2^nd, 2015.