ISLAMABAD      -          President Dr Arif Alvi has 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, besides ensuring quality and swift provision of basic services at their doorsteps. He said that the bureaucracy should focus on providing relief to the people by removing redundant impediments to the provision of hassle-free swift services to the people. The President expressed these views while addressing the participants of the 117th National Management Course (NMC), comprising senior civil servants of different services and occupational groups, at Aiwan-e-Sadr, on Wednesday. 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 of the country. He said that 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. 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 the President said that the bureaucracy needed to provide solutions to problems by identifying the issues, 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. Replying to another question, the President said that although provinces spent more than 20% of their budgets on education, the quality and quantity of the educational services required substantial improvement. He underlined the important role of civil bureaucracy in ensuring allocation of resources and its judicious, purposeful and objective utilization to improve condition of existing schools and create new facilities, both in-house and online and to bring over 20 million outof-school children into the education system. 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.