Promoting good governance through IT

It is indeed a matter of satisfaction that although Pakistan started out late to join the Information Technology revolution, it has made appreciable progress in the field.
President General Pervez Musharraf presented some important statistics on the subject while delivering his inaugural address on Thursday at a seminar on "e-Government", jointly organised by the Microsoft Limited and the National Defence College in Islamabad.
He said that when he took over power four years ago, his government devised an IT policy that aimed at encouraging education in this field with a view to improve the job situation.
Things since have come a long way. The technology has spread from the educational institutions to a wide range of offices and homes.
Internet facility has been extended from 87 cities to 18,900 cities and small towns. Fibre optics technology, that was confined to only 29 cities, now covers 420 cities and towns.
Meanwhile, seven new IT universities have been set up. Additionally, a number of IT schools, with or without government recognition, have sprouted all over the country.
The government, however, is yet to make a productive use of IT in the service of good governance. It needs to establish a well honed IT culture in its own departments.
Some of the public sector organisations and departments do maintain computerised databases, but only for limited use.
They must increase IT applications in order to carry out collation and correlation studies so as to plan better, and also to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their delivery systems.
Equally important, all government departments must create their own web sites and post public domain information on them.
That one step alone can go a long way in creating transparency - an essential ingredient of good governance.
As a matter of fact, a persistent public complaint with regard to public sector business contracts, privatisation deals, revenue and taxation issues, and of course the working of the accountability bureau, is lack of transparency. If all such information is available on the respective official web sites, it would become easier for the concerned people to scrutinise it and offer a challenge if a particular case so requires.
This is not asking for too much. It, in fact, is common for government departments in the advanced countries to post not only basic statistics on their web sites, but also important studies and analyses.
For example, it may be recalled, that while the Pakistan government was content with its claim losses worth about one billion dollars only on account of the US attack on Afghanistan, it was the web site of Pentagon itself that, on the basis of its own research and analysis, had put the losses at around $10 billion.
The information was picked up by the interested party, a former Pakistani finance minister belonging to the Opposition PML-N, and employed to show that we had been had for cheap by Washington.
The instance clearly demonstrates that the right use of IT has a big role to play towards creating transparency, which in turn can help correct a lot of intentional or unintentional government wrong-doings.
Hence, the need to introduce IT in all government departments with a view to promoting good governance cannot be over-emphasised.