Punjab takes stride towards e-governance

LAHORE: The Punjab has taken a leap in e-governance with digitisation of land record and criminal records of the province’s 709 police stations, mapping of areas according to intensity of crime and monitoring of schools, hospitals and vaccinators through global positioning system-enabled devices.

Punjab Information Technology Board has won laurels from various global institutions, including the World Bank for the systems it developed to ensure better compliance from bureaucracy and plugging all the loopholes that hindered the real-time monitoring. 

Headed by Dr Omar Saif, the PIBT has ensured better service delivery in health, education and transfer of property. The progress on its initiatives is available on its official website.

There are 54,000 schools in the Punjab with strength of 325,000 teaching staff. Ensuring the presence of teachers and children was earlier a challenge. Teacher absenteeism was hard to monitor.  The PIBT provided global positioning system-enabled (GPS) tablets to 800 monitoring evaluation assistants (MEAs -- mostly retired junior commissioned army personnel). These MEAs visit every school at least once a month and record the attendance of teachers and students on the day of their visit.

The GPS system, in the tablet, confirms their visit to the school. They also take photographs of class rooms, toilets, playing area and corridors of the school that reach the concerned education officer of the district as well as the secretary education Punjab.  

In addition, these MEAs are provided with questionnaires on every subject and for every class. They ask questions accordingly from the students and the answers are available with concerned education officials. The teachers are warned to improve educational outcomes on the basis of students’ feedbacks. 

Dr Saif said due to strict and random monitoring 8,000 teachers were suspended. He said the system also unearthed a major flaw in the system as 24,000 teachers were found to be teaching in schools where they were not officially posted.

In the health sector, the major issue was the performance of the vaccinators. There are 3,750 vaccinators but the repeated outburst of vaccine preventable diseases showed that their performance was not satisfactory. 

Through vaccinators’ tracking program, the vaccinators are provided smartphones with GPS technology. They are assigned housing clusters identified through Google map and asked to send photograph of each child they vaccine through smartphone. 

Before this monitoring system was in place, each vaccinator had claims of vaccinating thousands of children a month. The population of vaccinated children was, however, much lower. 

Digital monitoring showed that each vaccinator, on an average, vaccinates 12 children a day that is sufficient to cover entire population of five years old in the province.  

Dr Saif said attendance of vaccinators has increased to 91 percent from 21 percent in the last three months. The incidence of communicable diseases would drastically reduce in Punjab in the coming years. 

He said the World Bank has appreciated this initiative and a presentation of this digitised program would be given to the World Bank’s president when he visits Pakistan next week.

Likewise, more than 786 biometric devices record attendance of 17,000 doctors when they enter and leave their duty. Attendance has appreciably increased. The attendance of medical officers has increased to 83 percent from 35 percent. 

PBIT chief revealed that 837 MEAs with GPS tablets randomly visit every hospital in the province and send 70 photographs of different wards and locations of the hospital. A MEA can now send only a latest image of the original location owing to the technology. Out of 25,000 Mozas in the Punjab, land record of 23000 has been digitised.

Criminal records in 709 police stations of the province have been digitised. The hand-held battery operated biometric device could identify all criminals registered in the Punjab at all check points or in random checking. This has ensured elimination of criminals by apprehending them through random checking. Biometric hand-held devices have also been provided to army and rangers.

Since registering FIR though email is a farce, 228 police stations in Punjab have been provided with digitally connected laptops where every complaint is registered. The complaint is monitored by a superintendent of police of the area at 7pm daily. If the matter is not resolved within 72 hours, an FIR is registered. The complainant is informed about status of his complaint through a mobile text message. Dr Saif said the areas, where crime intensity is high, are identified with nature and timing of crime. This provides law enforcers to increase surveillance in these areas. He said crime footprint would decrease appreciably in the province.