Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif has underlined the need to bring about a positive change in the mindsets of people serving in public sector for their adoption of e-governance in order to improve efficiency and enhance co-ordination in the government's working.
The Prime Minister expressed these views while chairing a high level meeting on e-governance at the Prime Minister's Office. The PM said that for the attainment of the present government's agenda of good governance, the implementation of e-governance in public sector is necessary. The Prime Minister further said that with the use of technology and adoption of e-governance, we can overcome redundancies, enhance efficiencies and promote transparency and accountability which were the hallmarks of good governance.
The meeting was informed by Minister of State for Information Technology Anusha Rehman that Pakistan stood 156th in the international e-governance ranking. Terming it a sorry state of affairs, the Prime Minister emphasised that in order to take Pakistan forward, we need to immediately start implementing e-governance and the first stage in this connection, he said, was to automate Ministries and Departments for fast track and knowledge based decision making.
He further said that his government has always attached high priority to the induction of innovations and modernisation in the public sector and recalled that the Pakistan Muslim League (N) - led government from 1997-99 gave the first IT policy to the country. The meeting also discussed various proposals and means to move forward in the direction of complete implementation of e-governance in the public sector. Overall reforms of the public sector also came under discussion during the meeting.
Ahsan Iqbal, Minister for Planning & Development, Anusha Rehman, Minister of State for Information Technology, Eng. Khurram Dastagir, Minister of State for Science & Technology, Shaukat Tarin and senior officials of the Ministry of IT and the Prime Minister's Office also attended the meeting.