I NFORMATION Technology has brought revolution in the whole world with countries developing systems to facilitate their peoples and provide civic services to them at their doorsteps. It is heartening to note that our country is now also trying to take that direction for the convenience of the public. Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday launched Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) City App which had been developed with the collective efforts of Islamabad Administration and the National Information Technology Board bringing various departments on one page. The development of this app which envisages provision of forty-three different services online including e-policing, domiciles, identity cards, passports, arms licenses and so on, is also timely and important in the context of fighting the spread of coronavirus. By using their mobiles or computers, the people will now be able to avail these basic services at their homes without going through the pain of long queues and long wait outside government offices. This indeed is an important step towards e-government and improving the efficiency of public sector departments, and we expect that the same kind of systems will be developed and deployed in other cities with the cooperation of provinces to bring ease in the life of the common man. Currently, apart from a lot of hassle, one has to grease the palm of lower cadre officials to get documents such as domiciles and record of ownership. Such online systems is a step in the right direction as it will reduce human interaction with the government offices, which in fact will go a long way in ending corruption in the public sector departments whose officials never miss any opportunity to play with the sentiments of the people and rob their pockets under different pretexts. The government’s Citizen’s Portal has already proved to be a complete success story with hundreds of thousands of people turning to it to get their complaints addressed. We are confident that this app would also serve the purpose for which it has been developed. Any lacunas in the operational phase of the app should be addressed immediately, in addition to putting in place a monitoring mechanism that ensures time bound provision of services to the people
