ISLAMABAD - In a bid to utilise the computer technology in various federal and provincial departments of the country, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) government has stepped up its efforts to soon introduce e-government on experimental basis, sources said on Sunday.
So far, the projects completed in this regard include online processing of Haj applications and status tracking for arrangements for Hujjaj, automation of Prime Minister Office, e-Enablement of Senate and National Assembly of Pakistan, E-service for submission of documents at Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, automation of Estate Office, development of Urdu Lexicon, machine translation and text to speech software for Urdu language, online access to statutory case laws at district bar associations, automation of Patent Office, Karachi, E-Enablement of press clubs, salary disbursement through ATMs, IT skills training programme for probationary government officers, process mapping for improving efficiency of ministry of science & technology, installation of LAN and implementation of mail tracking and internal e-mail system at seven federal government divisions, IT technical support to provinces and AJK and development of PPHI website.
The sources further said that with introducing e-government, efficiency in computer technology and skills of the staff of government departments would possibly be polished and ensured as well. They also said that the government would get free of charge data hosting services from Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) for a period of 15 months to introduce e-government in almost 28 federal and provincial departments of the country. And, after passing 15 months, the task for data hosting will be handed over to National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC), which will provide data hosting service through its own data centre, they added.
Following a decision of the federal cabinet, Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) was established in October 2002. But it did nothing important towards introducing e-government in the departments. However, this time the directorate is expected to be active to successfully implement the project that after its establishment could not take any remarkable step and remained inactive largely because the previous governments remained in deep slumber and did not bother to materialize the long pending dream-cum-project of the ministry of information technology and telecommunication, a source in I&T ministry said.
When contacted with sources in PTCL to know the possibility and security of proposed e-government in government lined departments, they said that security of the data to be hosted on PTCL servers would not become issue or hurdle as the application is 128 bits encrypted and only less-secure files would also be placed on the servers. Already, the PTCL has one of the largest data centres in the country, and the government holds 76 per cent shares. They were of the opinion that the Electronic Government Directorate should step up its efforts as time is fast moving ahead while the directorate (EGD) had already done some good work by implementing a number of projects for automation of offices in the public and private sector.