Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has called upon the civil servants to focus on improving processes prevalent all across the administrative set-up with a view to reducing human intervention and direction in the decision-making of the government.
The Prime Minister said this while addressing a delegation comprising faculty members and participants of the 34th National Management Course at Administrative Staff College, who called on him here at the PM House on Thursday.
He said the government had made training of senior civil servants mandatory with a view to refining and reinforcing their skills and to enable them to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
The world is constantly changing and civil servants cannot cope with the complex new challenges without being trained in all the essential elements of statecraft including diplomacy economy, defence security and governance, he said.
The Prime Minister said the civil servants were an asset of the nation being the front-line of the government in its interaction with the people. The government, he said was fully alive to the important role played by the civil servants and it was with this in mind that they were trying to groom their skills and build their capacity.
Shaukat Aziz said he was aware that some civil servants were opposed to, while others were in favour of government's training programme.
"It is however gratifying to note that they are taken to the concept of training and are adjusting to its requirements."
"The idea was to break you away from what you were doing and give you an opportunity to sit back, reflect and take stock so as to open your minds to new ideas and innovation approaches," he said.
Talking about the importance of training, the Prime Minister pointed out that in the globalised world, no country could survive without foreign investment. Pakistan, he added was competing with the rest of the world to take the share of mind of the investor, which was not possible without developing niches.
The Prime Minister said it was unfair to expect civil servants, to give their best in the absence of clear-cut policies couched in coherent philosophical framework.
Recalling the situation prevailing in the country when President Pervez Musharraf assumed the reins of the government, the Prime Minister said Pakistan was close to be declared as bankrupt state.
"We have come a long way from those times as apart from achieving the second highest growth rate of 8.4 per cent last year, the country's respect and honour has been restored in the comity of nations", the Prime Minister said.
This, he said would not have been possible without improvement in "all essential elements of the statecraft." The Prime Minister said when he joined the government he found the civil servants very committed and hardworking. "If anything, the people who worked with me in the Finance Ministry were in many cases more hardworking than those who worked under me in the private sector", he said.