President Dr Arif Alvi on Wednesday urged civil servants to transform bureaucracy into a service-oriented discipline by increasing its efficiency and outreach, especially to the underprivileged and underserved areas of the country.He said the bureaucracy should focus on providing relief to the people by removing redundant impediments, thus providing hassle-free swift services to the people at their doorsteps.
The president expressed these views while addressing the participants of 117th National Management Course (NMC), comprising senior civil servants of different services and occupational groups, at Aiwan-e-Sadr, President Secretariat Press Wing said in a press release.
Addressing the participants, the president said that 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.
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 observed.
President urges bureaucracy to provide prompt services to public . President Dr Arif Alvi in a group photo with the participants of the 117th National Management Course, comprising of senior civil servants of different services and occupational groups, at Aiwan-e-Sadr, Islamabad.
The president highlighted the need to review Pakistan’s bureaucratic processes to bring in an exponential increase in its effectiveness, efficiency and outcome with the help of Artificial Intelligence-based technologies.
While replying to a question, he said 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.The president said that Pakistan was facing population growth, which was putting tremendous pressure on its limited resources, however, out-of-box ideas and solutions could help better manage the population growth and thus converting them into an economic and financial asset.He said that out of 8 million pregnancies every year, half were unwanted, and by improving the availability of contraceptives these unwanted pregnancies could be reduced to half, which would help reduce population growth. Replying to another question, the president said that although provinces spent more than 20% of their budgets on education, however, the quality and quantity of the educational services required substantial improvement. He underlined the important role of civil bureaucracy in ensuring the allocation of resources and its judicial, purposeful and objective utilization to improve the condition of existing schools and create new facilities, both in-house and online and to bring over 20 million out-of-school children into the education system.
