ISLAMABAD, Nov 30 (APP): 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.

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.

He said that assistive technology and enabling conditions for over 20 million differently-abled persons could make them economically empowered and would ensure their mainstreaming.

He also highlighted the permeation of mental health disorders and issues and said that over 24% of country’s population was facing mental health issues and underlined the need for taking necessary steps to reduce the stress level in society by taking appropriate time-bound interventions.

The president underscored that the world needed qualified and skillful human resources, especially in the IT and Cyber Security sectors, and if Pakistan managed to provide the required knowledge, education and skills to its youth, it could turn them into a highly productive human resource.

The president said that experience around the world had shown that hybrid and online education systems were more effective in terms of quality and cost and were playing a vital role for those students who could not acquire an in-house education. 

He further said that the Higher Education Commission and Higher Education Institutes should benchmark the best practices of the hybrid and online education system to increase their reach to a large number of people without compromising the quality of education.

The president also highlighted the need to improve the justice system by removing backlog and making the provision of justice inexpensive, which would help in streamlining our systems and providing speedy relief to the people.

Currently, 117th NMC with 52 participants is in progress and its aim is to build the capacity of senior officers of civil services to help formulate and implement the public policy for the continuous improvement of governance at national and provincial levels.